LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Gemini’s Hypothetical Present” by jefftk


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I use several AI models at work, switching between them based on which
is best at the kind of work I'm doing. In my limited testing I've
found Opus 4.6 to be the best coder (via Claude Code) and has the best
taste in writing, while GPT 5.2 Thinking is mildly smarter. Gemini
3.0 Pro feels like it has the capacity to be much smarter, but is very
often held back by various strange errors. The one I see the most is
that it has a lot of trouble accepting the changes to the world since
its training data, and seems to put a lot of effort into keeping track
of everything as a giant hypothetical.

For example, the first query I thought to test this on in writing this
post was [Who leads the Department of War?] and it gave the reasonable
answer "The Department of War is currently led by Secretary of War
Pete Hegseth," followed by a short explanation. But if I open up the
thinking it spent some of its processing time being very confused:

...
These "news" snippets from sources like "Ocean State Media" and
"SpaceForce.mil" are throwing up red flags. The [...]

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First published:

February 13th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ycHjk2o66PuzmYXuA/gemini-s-hypothetical-present

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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