Is it possible they are just falling behind ?
Their newest model wasn’t really SOTA. And honestly fable 5 was the most human like model I’d ever tried. It was an incredible jump.
And recently lots of Claude users at r/ClaudeAI are noticing Opus 4.8 has really increased in capability. Not new things but maybe redirected compute. It just feels like one of the best models ever, maybe because the compute that was previously assigned to Fable has been redirected? It feels incredible.
from the looks of it, 3.5 Flash is still better than most models
https://artificialanalysis.ai/articles/glm-5-2-is-the-new-le...
The idea of "falling behind" when you can leapfrog each other every six months leads me to believe it has to be more than just "falling behind" for one cycle. It's a culture, process, red tape, focus, or mandate problem of some sort. Something not as easily correctable preparing for next launch.
They almost certainly wanted 3.5 Pro out for Google IO a few weeks ago. They're still crunching on it. No ETA given. Would be fascinating to read about the behind the scenes stories (failed training run?) if they ever get told.
Gemini is super bad, grok is actually superior most of the time and that's saying something because grok also sucks.
> noticing Opus 4.8 has really increased in capability
I've definitely noticed it, at least for doing backend C#/dotnet. Its insanely good, I haven't had to babysit much at all this week.