Google's new AI mode is good, actually

Interestingly, per the recent Google antitrust ruling documents, AI mode is extra fast because of a special FastSearch index: https://x.com/Marie_Haynes/status/1963031598829314161

Gemini in general is extremely fast, compared to ChatGPT 5 Thinking.

It also seems to excel at things ChatGPT 5 Thinking isn't good at. Simple things like "Here's a screenshot of text, please transcribe it" - ChatGPT 5 Thinking will spend 2 minutes and still get the results wrong, while Gemini Pro will spend 20-30 seconds and transcribe everything perfectly.

Obviously that's just 1 use case, but as someone who previously used ChatGPT exclusively, I'm increasingly impressed by Gemini the more I use it. Mainly due to the much faster thinking times that seem to provide equal or better results than GTP 5 Thinking.

Gemini is very fast because it runs on TPUsV7 mostly

>"Here's a screenshot of text, please transcribe it"

I took pictures of a book, asked Gemini to transcribe, then to translate them and I'm now in the process of having it reproduce the whole book in latex (lot of figures). Not sure exactly what I'm doing but but I've been wondering: Should I reproduce the publishing house logo? Or invent my own? Damn, this is fun.

It is definitely because it's a smaller model. TPUv7 has ~10% lower flops at FP8 and 33% lower memory bandwidth than Nvidia Blackwell cards. Add CUDA to the comparison and they'll probably be even worse at real world utilization. Grok is already running on Blackwell cards and although there's little info on GPT5, I doubt they are behind.

Gemini models have always been the strongest at image understanding. We're talking like 1.5 years now. It's also better at a good number of non-English/European languages, this too has been ever since 1.5 pro.