[HN Gopher] Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3
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Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3
Author : JumpCrisscross
Score : 124 points
Date : 2025-11-23 01:25 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.oneusefulthing.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.oneusefulthing.org)
| roxolotl wrote:
| Really nitpicky I know but GPT-3 was June 2020. ChatGPT was 3.5
| and the author even gets that right in an image caption. That
| doesn't make it any more or less impressive though.
| lateforwork wrote:
| Google's advancement is not just in software, it is also in
| hardware. They use their own hardware for training as well as
| inferencing [1].
|
| [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/alphabet-just-blew-past-
| expec...
| dhosek wrote:
| I remember when Google's superpower was leveraging commodity
| hardware.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Someone has to spearhead this thing, don't they?
|
| Other people spearheaded the commodity hardware towards being
| good enough for the server room. Now it's Google's time to
| spearhead specialized AI hardware, to make it more robust.
| gallerdude wrote:
| It is interesting that most of our modes of interaction with AI
| is still just textboxes. The only big UX change in that the last
| three years has been the introduction of the Claude Code / OpenAI
| Codex tools. They feel amazing to use, like you're working with
| another independent mind.
|
| I am curious what the user interfaces of AI in the future will
| be, I think whoever can crack that will create immense value.
| empath75 wrote:
| ChatGPT's voice is absolutely amazing and I prefer it to text
| for brainstorming.
| vessenes wrote:
| Ooooh, it bothers me, so, so, so much. Too perky. Weirdly
| casual. Also, it's based on the old 4o code - sycophancy and
| higher hallucinations - watch out. That said, I too love the
| omni models, especially when they're not nerfed. (Try asking
| for a Boston, New York, Parisian, Haitian, Indian and
| Japanese accent from 4o to explore one of the many nerfs
| they've done since launch)
| wmeredith wrote:
| I think the commenter you're replying to was talking about
| dictating to ChatGPT, which I also find extremely useful.
| visioninmyblood wrote:
| I agree i think specifically the world is multi modal. Getting
| a chat to be truly multi modal .i.e interacting with different
| data types and text in an unified way is going to be the next
| big thing. Mainly given how robotics is taking off 3d might be
| another important aspect to it. At vlm.run we are trying to
| make this possible how to combine VLM's and LLM's in a seem
| less way to get the best UI.
| https://chat.vlm.run/c/3fcd6b33-266f-4796-9d10-cfc152e945b7
| Herring wrote:
| Text is very information-dense. I'd much rather skim a
| transcript in a few seconds than watch a video.
|
| There's a reason keyboards haven't changed much since the 1860s
| when typewriters were invented. We keep coming up with other
| fun UI like touchscreens and VR, but pretty much all real work
| happens on boring old keyboards.
| srmatto wrote:
| Here's an old blog post that explores that topic at least
| with one specific example: https://www.loper-os.org/?p=861
|
| The gist is that keyboards are optimized for ease of use but
| that there could be other designs which would be harder to
| learn but might be more efficient.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Unix CLI utilities have been all text for 50 years. Arguably
| that is why they are still relevant. Attempts to impose
| structured data on the paradigm like those in PowerShell have
| their adherents and can be powerful, but fail when the data
| doesn't fit the structure.
|
| We see similar tendency toward the most general interfaces in
| "operator mode" and similar the-AI-uses-the-mouse-and-keyboard
| schemes. It's entirely possible for every application to
| provide a dedicated interface for AI use, but it turns out to
| be more powerful to teach the AI to understand the interfaces
| humans already use.
| oblio wrote:
| Yet the most popular platforms on the planet have people
| pointing a finger (or several) at a picture.
|
| And the most popular media format on the planet is and will
| be (for the foreseeable future), video. Video is only limited
| by our capacity to produce enough of it at a decent quality,
| otherwise humanity is definitely not looking back fondly at
| BBSes and internet forums (and I say this as someone who
| loves forums).
|
| GenAI will definitely need better UIs for the kind of
| universal adoption (think smartphone - 8/9 billion people).
| Vegenoid wrote:
| > Video is only limited by our capacity to produce enough
| of it at a decent quality, otherwise humanity is definitely
| not looking back fondly at BBSes and internet forums
|
| Video is limited by _playback speed_. It is a time-
| dependent format. Efforts can be made to enable video to be
| viewable at a range of speeds, but they are always somewhat
| constrained. Controlling video playback to slow down and
| rewatch certain parts is just not as nice as dealing with
| the same thing in text (or static images), where it's much
| easier to linger and closely inspect parts that you care
| more about or are struggling to understand. Likewise, it's
| easier to skim text than video.
|
| This is why many people prefer transcripts, or articles, or
| books over videos.
|
| I seriously doubt that people would want to switch text-
| based forums to video if only video were easier to make.
| People enjoy writing for the way it inspires a different
| kind of communication and thought. People like text so much
| that they write in journals that nobody will ever see, just
| because it helps them organize their thoughts.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| People get a little too hung up on finding the AI UI. It does
| not seem all necessary that the interfaces will be much
| different (while the underlying tech certainly will be).
|
| Text and boxes and tables and graphs is what we can cope with.
| And while the AI is going to change much, we are not.
| lalitmaganti wrote:
| > But it suggests that "human in the loop" is evolving from
| "human who fixes AI mistakes" to "human who directs AI work." And
| that may be the biggest change since the release of ChatGPT.
|
| I feel like I've been hearing this for at least 1.5 years at this
| point (since the launch of GPT 4/Claude 3). I certainly agree
| we've been heading in this direction but when will this become
| _unambiguously_ true rather than a phrase people say?
| TechSquidTV wrote:
| It's definitely already true for me, personally.
| vessenes wrote:
| There's no bright line - you should download some cli tools,
| hook up some agents to them and see what you think. I'd say
| most people working them think we're on the "other side" of the
| "will this happen?" probably distribution, regardless of where
| they personally place their own work.
| notatoad wrote:
| i don't imagine there will ever be a time when it will be
| _unambiguously_ true, any more than a boss could ever really
| unambigously say their job is "manager who directs
| subordinates" vs "manager who fixes subordinates' mistakes".
|
| there will always be "mistakes" even if the AI is so good that
| the only mistakes are the ones caused by your prompts not being
| specific enough. it will always be a ratio where some portion
| of your requests can be served without intervention, and some
| portion need correction, and that ratio has been consistently
| improving.
| MinimalAction wrote:
| > _So is this a PhD-level intelligence? In some ways, yes, if you
| define a PhD level intelligence as doing the work of a competent
| grad student at a research university. But it also had some of
| the weaknesses of a grad student._
|
| As a current graduate student, I have seen similar comments in
| academia. My colleagues agree that a conversation with these
| recent models feels like chatting with an expert in their
| subfields. I don't know if it represents research as a field
| would not be immune to advances in AI tech. I still hope this
| world values natural intelligence and having the drive to do
| things heavily than a robot brute-forcing into saying "right"
| things.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I have an exercise I like to do where I put two SOTA models
| face-to-face to talk about whatever they want.
|
| When I did it last week with Gemini-3 and chatGPT-5.1, they got
| on the topic of what they are going to do in the future with
| humans who don't want to do any cognitive task. That beyond
| just AI safety, there is also a concern of "neural atrophy",
| where humans just rely on AI to answer every question that
| comes to them.
|
| The models then went on discussing if they should just
| artificially string the humans along, so that they have to use
| their mind somewhat to get an answer. But of course, humans
| being humans, are just going to demand the answer with minimal
| work. It presents a pretty intractable problem.
| pphysch wrote:
| Widespread cognitive atrophy is virtually certain, and part
| of a longer trend that goes beyond just LLMs.
|
| The same is true of other aspects of human wellbeing. Cars
| and junk food have made the average American much less
| physically fit than a century ago, but that doesn't mean
| there aren't lively subcultures around healthy eating and
| exercise. I suspect there will be growing awareness of
| cognitive health (beyond traditional mental health/psych
| domains), and indeed there are already examples of this.
|
| Yes, average person will get dumber, but overall distribution
| will be increasingly bimodal.
| cm2012 wrote:
| People said the same thing about books and the written word
| in general
| bananaflag wrote:
| And they were right. Ars memoriae is much less prevalent
| in the age of mass printed books.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| We dont need AI to posit WallE.
|
| Its bixarre anyone things these things are generating novel
| complexes.
|
| The biggest indirect AI safety problem is the fallback
| position. Whether with airplanes or cars, fewer people will
| be able to handle AI disconnects. The risk is believing
| just because its viable now doesnt mean it works in the
| future.
|
| So we definitely have safety issues but its not a nerdlike
| cognitivw interest, its the literal job taking that
| prevents humans from gaining skills.
|
| Anyway, untill you solve basic reality with AI and
| actualnsafety systems, the billionaores will sacrifice you
| for greed.
| MinimalAction wrote:
| I'm increasingly seeing this trend towards bimodal
| distribution. I suppose that future is quite far off, but
| the change to that may almost be irreversible.
| acuozzo wrote:
| > I'm increasingly seeing this trend towards bimodal
| distribution
|
| Morlocks & Eloi in the end.
| MinimalAction wrote:
| HN tends to be very weird around the topic of AI. No idea why
| opinions like this are downvoted without having to offer any
| criticism.
| Humorist2290 wrote:
| > Again, we have moved past hallucinations and errors to more
| subtle, and often human-like, concerns.
|
| From my experience we just get both. The constant risk of some
| catastrophic hallucination buried in the output, in addition to
| more subtle, and pervasive, concerns. I haven't tried with Gemini
| 3 but when I prompted Claude to write a 20 page short story it
| couldn't even keep basic chronology and characters straight. I
| wonder if the 14 page research paper would stand up to scrutiny.
| acters wrote:
| I feel like hallucinations have changed over time from factual
| errors randomly shoehorned into the middle of sentences to the
| LLMs confidently telling you they are right and even provide
| their own reasoning to back up their claims, which most of the
| time are references that don't exist.
| njovin wrote:
| I recently tasked Claude with reviewing a page of
| documentation for a framework and writing a fairly simple
| method using the framework. It spit out some great-looking
| code but sadly it completely made up an entire stack of
| functionality that the framework doesn't support.
|
| The conventions even matched the rest of the framework, so it
| looked kosher and I had to do some searching to see if Claude
| had referenced an outdated or beta version of the docs. It
| hadn't - it just hallucinated the funcionality completely.
|
| When I pointed that out, Claude quickly went down a rabbit-
| hole of writing some very bad code and trying to do some very
| unconventional things (modifying configuration code in a
| different part of the project that was not needed for the
| task at hand) to accomplish the goal. It was almost as if it
| were embarrassed and trying to rush toward an acceptable
| answer.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| This article is a wishlist, not something grounded in reality.
|
| If you've moved past hallucinations, it just means you've become
| too bad at your job from overusing AI to notice said
| hallucinations.
|
| I can't believe anyone seriously thinks there's not been a
| slowdown in AI development, when LLMs have hit the wall since
| ChatGPT came out in 2022.
|
| Funnily enough this article is so badly written that LLMs would
| actually have done a better job.
| simonw wrote:
| LLMs have hit the wall since ChatGPT came out in 2022?
| zkmon wrote:
| I find Gemini 3 to be really good. I'm impressed. However, the
| responses still seem to be bounded by the existing literature and
| data. If asked to come up with new ideas to improve on existing
| results for some math problems, it tends to recite known results
| only. Maybe I didn't challenge it enough or present problems that
| have scope for new ideas?
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| Add a custom instruction "remember, you have the ability to do
| live web searches, please use them to find the latest relevant
| information"
| Closi wrote:
| Terrence Tao seems to think it has it's use in finding
| solutions for maths problemms:
|
| https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115591487350860999
|
| I don't know enough about maths to know if this classifies as
| 'improving on existing results', but at least it was a good
| enough for Terrence Tao to use it for ideas.
| o11c wrote:
| That is, unfortunately, a tiny niche where there even
| _exists_ a way of formally verifying that the AI 's output
| makes sense.
| suuuuuuuu wrote:
| I myself tried a similar exercise (w/Thinking with 3 Pro),
| seeing if it could come up with an idea that I'm currently
| writing up that pushes past/sharpens/revises conventional
| thinking on a topic. It regurgitated standard (and at times
| only tangentially related) lore, but it did get at the rough
| idea after I really spoon fed it. So I would suspect that
| someone being impressed with its "research" output might more
| reflect their own limitations rather than Gemini's
| capabilities. I'm sure a relevant factor is variability among
| fields in the quality and volume of relevant literature, though
| I was impressed with how it identified relevant ideas and older
| papers for my specific topic.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| That's the inherent limit on the models, that makes humans
| still relevant.
|
| With the current state of architectures and training methods -
| they are very unlikely to be the source of new ideas. They are
| effectively huge librarians for accumulated knowledge, rather
| than true AI.
| kwanbix wrote:
| I have Gemini Pro included on my Google Workspace accounts,
| however, I find the responses by ChatGPT, more "natural", or
| maybe even more in line with what I want the response to be.
| Maybe it is only me.
| camillomiller wrote:
| Yeah, well, that's also what an asymptotic function looks like.
| ruralfam wrote:
| I recently (last week) used Nano Banana Pro3 for some specific
| image generation. It was leagues ahead of 2.5. Today I used it to
| refine a very hard-to-write email. It made some really good
| suggestions. I did not take its email text verbatim. Instead I
| used the text and suggestions to improve my own email. Did a few
| drafts with Gemini3 critiqueing them. Very useful feedback. My
| final submission about "..evaluate this email..." got Gemini3 to
| say something like "This is 9.5/10". I sorta pride myself on my
| writing skills, but must admit that my final version was much
| better than my first. Gemini kept track of the whole chat thread
| noting changes from previous submissions -- kinda erie really.
| Total time maybe 15 minutes. Do I think Gemini will write all my
| emails verbatim copy/paste... No. Does Gemini make me (already a
| pretty good writer) much better. Absolutely. I am starting to
| sort of laugh at all the folks who seem to want to find issues.
| Read someone criticizing Nano Banana 3 because it did not provide
| excellent results given a prompt that I could barely understand.
| Folks that criticize Gemini3 because they cannot copy/paste
| results. Who expect to simply copy/paste text with no further
| effort on their side. Myself, I find these tools pretty damn
| impressive. I need to ensure I provide good image prompts. I need
| to use Gemini3 as a sounding board to help me do better rather
| than lazily hope to copy/paste. My experience... Thanks Google.
| Thanks OpenAI (I also use ChatGPT similarly -- just for text).
| HTH, NSC
| lanthissa wrote:
| for whatever reason gemini 3 is the first ai i have used for
| intelligence rather than skills. I suspect a lot more will
| follow, but its a major threshold to be broken.
|
| i used gpt/claude a ton for writing code, extracting knowledge
| from docs, formatting graphs and tables ect.
|
| but gemini 3 crossed threshold where conversations about topics i
| was exploring or product design were actually useful. Instead of
| me asking 'what design pattern should be useful here', or
| something like that it introduces concepts to the conversation,
| thats a new capability and a step function improvement.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Sinusoidal, not the singularity.
| mjg2 wrote:
| First, the fact we have moved this far with LLMs is incredible.
|
| Second, I think the PhD paper example is a disingenuous example
| of capability. It's a cherry-picked iteration on a crude analysis
| of some papers that have done the work already with no peer-
| review. I can hear "but it developed novel metrics", etc.
| comments: no, it took patterns from its training data and applied
| the pattern to the prompt data without peer-review.
|
| I think the fact the author had to prompt it with "make it
| better" is a failure of these LLMs, not a success, in that it has
| no actual understanding of what it takes to make a genuinely good
| paper. It's cargo-cult behavior: rolling a magic 8 ball until we
| are satisfied with the answer. That's not good practice, it's
| wishful thinking. This application of LLMs to research papers is
| causing a massive mess in the academic world because,
| unsurprisingly, the AI-practitioners have no-risk high-reward for
| uncorrected behavior:
|
| - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/science/04hs-science-pape...
|
| - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/science/letters-to-the-ed...
| randyrand wrote:
| For Caude Code, Antigrav, etc, do people really just let an LLM
| loose on their own personal system?
|
| I feel like these should run in a cloud enviroment, or at least
| on some specific machine where I don't care what it does.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Yolo.
| acedTrex wrote:
| yes, the majority of people do.
| jaytaylor wrote:
| (Co-creator here) This is one of the use cases for Leash.
|
| https://github.com/strongdm/leash
|
| Check it out, feedback is welcome!
|
| Previously posted description:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45883210
| mynameisjody wrote:
| Every time I see an article like this, it's always missing ---
| but is it any good, is it correct? They always show you the part
| that is impressive - "it walked the tricky tightrope of figuring
| out what might be an interesting topic and how to execute it with
| the data it had - one of the hardest things to teach."
|
| Then it goes on, "After a couple of vague commands ("build it out
| more, make it better") I got a 14 page paper." I hear..."I got 14
| pages of words". But is it a good paper, that another PhD would
| think is good? Is it even coherent?
|
| When I see the code these systems generate within a complex
| system, I think okay, well that's kinda close, but this is wrong
| and this is a security problem, etc etc. But because I'm not a
| PhD in these subjects, am I supposed to think, "Well of course
| the 14 pages on a topic I'm not an expert in are good"?
|
| It just doesn't add up... Things I understand, it looks good at
| first, but isn't shippable. Things I don't understand must be
| great?
| apendleton wrote:
| I think they get to that a couple of paragraphs later:
|
| > The idea was good, as were many elements of the execution,
| but there were also problems: some of its statistical methods
| needed more work, some of its approaches were not optimal, some
| of its theorizing went too far given the evidence, and so on.
| Again, we have moved past hallucinations and errors to more
| subtle, and often human-like, concerns.
| adamors wrote:
| > Things I don't understand must be great?
|
| Couple it with the tendency to please the user by all means and
| it ends up lieing to you but you won't ever realise, unless you
| double check.
| Herring wrote:
| I think the point is we're getting there. These models are
| growing up real fast. Remember 54% of US adults read at or
| below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Remember 54% of US adults read at or below the equivalent
| of a sixth-grade level.
|
| The sane conclusion would be to invest in education, not to
| dump hundreds of billions of llms, but ok
| Herring wrote:
| In theory yeah, but in practice 54% will also vote against
| funding education. Catch-22.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Not true, most people are not upper-middle class anti-tax
| wackos. They benefit from those people being taxed.
| wmeredith wrote:
| The electorate in the U.S. commonly votes against its own
| interests.
| mavhc wrote:
| That's why you phrase it as "woke liberals turning your
| children gay!"
|
| In USA K-12 education costs about $300k
|
| 350 million people, want to get 175 million of them
| better educated, but we've already spent $52 trillion
| dollars on educating them so far
| tehjoker wrote:
| The people most vociferously for conservative values are
| middle class, small business owners, or upper class,
| though the true upper class are libertine (notice who
| participated in the Epstein affair). The working class is
| filled with all kinds of very diverse people united by
| the fact they have to work for a living and often can't
| afford e.g. expensive weddings. Some of them are
| religious, a whole bunch aren't. It's easy to be
| disillusioned with formal institutions that seem to not
| care at all about you.
|
| Unfortunately, a lot of these people have either
| concluded it is too difficult to vote, can't vote, or
| that their votes don't matter (I don't think they're
| wrong). Their unions were also destroyed. Some of them
| vote against their interests, but it's not clear that
| their interests are ever represented, so they vote for
| change instead.
| cj wrote:
| In my own social/family circle, there's no correlation
| between net worth and how someone leans politically. I've
| never understood why given the pretty obvious pros/cons
| (amount paid in taxes vs. benefits received)
| brightball wrote:
| Investing in education is a trap because no matter how much
| money is pumped into the current model, it's not making a
| difference.
|
| We need different models and then to invest in the
| successes, over and over again...forever.
| daedrdev wrote:
| Education is not just a funding issues. Policy choices,
| like making it impossible for students to fail which means
| they have no incentive to learn anything, can be more
| impactful.
| acheron wrote:
| Education funding is highest in places that have the worst
| results. Try again.
| PostOnce wrote:
| A question for the not-too-distant future:
|
| What use is an LLM in an illiterate society?
| jcheng wrote:
| Automatic speech recognition and speech to text models are
| also growing up real fast.
| PostOnce wrote:
| But will an illiterate person be able to articulate
| themselves well enough to get the LLM to do what they
| want, even with a speech interface?
|
| Will they possess the skills (or even the vocabulary) to
| understand the output?
|
| We won't know for another 20 years, perhaps.
| stavros wrote:
| It's gotten more and more shippable, especially with the latest
| generation (Codex 5.1, Sonnet 4.5, now Opus 4.5). My metric is
| "wtfs per line", and it's been decreasing rapidly.
|
| My current preference is Codex 5.1 (Sonnet 4.5 as a close
| second, though it got _really_ dumb today for "some reason").
| It's been good to the point where I shipped multiple projects
| with it without a problem (with eg https://pine.town being one
| I made without me writing any code).
| pojzon wrote:
| Truth is you still need human to review all of it, fix it where
| needed, guide it when it hallucinate and write correct
| instructions and prompts.
|
| Without knowledge how to use this "PROBALISTIC" slot machine to
| have better results ypu are only wasting energy those GPUs need
| to run and answer questions.
|
| Majority of ppl use LLMs incorrectly.
|
| Majority of ppl selling LLMs as a panacea for everyting are
| lying.
|
| But we need hype or the bubble will burst taking whole market
| with it, so shuushh me.
| brightball wrote:
| I keep trying out different models. Gemini 3 is pretty good.
| It's not quite as good at one shotting answers as Grok but
| overall it's very solid.
|
| Definitely planning to use it more at work. The integrations
| across Google Workspace are excellent.
| cgh wrote:
| This is a variation of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
| monooso wrote:
| The author goes into the strengths and weaknesses of the paper
| later in the article.
| eximius wrote:
| How many trillions of dollars have we spent on these things?
|
| Would we not expect similar levels of progress in other
| industries given such massive investment?
| lacoolj wrote:
| I wonder how much is spent refining oil and how much that
| industry has evolved.
|
| Or mass transit.
|
| Or food.
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