I think the record is quite clear, GDM was never in the race.

All of the Gemini models have been considerably behind the capabilities frontier. The only exception was 3.0 which seemed quite good, but had latent issues and we were all measuring with the incorrect metric, agentic where it's latent issues were very pronounced.

GDM+Google may have created an exceptionally efficient LLM for serving search. This is likely a great accomplishment (or maybe Google is burning money at a rate unheard of before). But Frontier capability: they have never been in the race.

This is sad, since they had everything necessary to be on or beyond the frontier.