New Google Model Ranked ‘No. 1 LLM’, But There’s a Problem

If anyone was wondering what Google was up to while OpenAI cooked up that new O1 series of models and Anthropic improved Claude, well, now we've got an answer, and it's a strange one. But the story here is not that the new Gemini model from Google ranks number one in a blind voting human preference leaderboard. No, there's a much bigger story about not just its flaws but but what they say about where AI and LLM specifically are going next. Of course, Sam Altman will weigh into the argument too. But first, as of yesterday, we have the new Gemini experimental 1114. That's the 14th of November if you're an American from Google DeepMind, this new model is Google's response to O1 preview from OpenAI and Anthropic's newly updated Claude 3.5 sonnet. The first slight problem is that they're having some technical difficulties with their API, so I wasn't actually able to run it on simple bench, but I did do a slight workaround the very hour it came out yesterday. I was eager to test it, not just because of its leaderboard position, but because the CEO of Google promised an exponential emoji with more to come. Seems to me a guarantee that the model is going to be amazing if the line goes up and to the right. Just to cut to the chase though, does this number one spot on the language model arena leaderboard mean we should all go out and and subscribe to Gemini Advanced? Well, no, not necessarily, for at least a handful of reasons. Starting with this number to the right, it's rank under style control. This leaderboard, don't forget, is made up of humans voting blindly on which of two answers they prefer. Over time it was discovered that humans prefer flowery language and longer responses, and that's a variable you can control for. So if we attempt to remove length and style of response as factors, you see Gemini, the new experimental model, dropping to fourth place. That would be below, by the way, the newly updated Claude 3.5 sonnet, which honestly is my daily use language model. If we limit ourselves only to mathematical questions, O1 preview jumps into the lead. And that's not a surprise to me at all. And what about only so called hard prompts? Well again there O Preview is in first place. But at this point I know what some of you might be thinking about this human preference leaderboard heralded by some key DeepMind researchers. You're probably probably wondering where are the benchmark scores? I remember when the first generation of Gemini models came out and it was proclaimed that we're in a new Gemini era. We got benchmarks and promotional videos. Then Gemini 1.5 was called a next generation model. Come September, when we had Gemini 1.5 Pro002, it was called an updated model. Now we more or less just have tweets and not even an API that's working yet. I know that might be coming soon, but it is a strange way of announcing a new mod model, especially one that genuinely does do better. This comes as we get reports in the last 48 hours that Google is struggling to improve its models. It's only eking out incremental gains. But then we had the Verge reporting that Google had intended to call its new series of models Gemini 2.0, and maybe they still will. But Demis Hasabis apparently was disappointed by the incremental gains. At least according to the Verge's sources, the model wasn't showing the performance gains that Demis Hassabis had hoped for. Will Google call this new Experimental Gemini Gemini 2.0 or just an updated 1.5 pro? At this point the names are more or less meaningless, so it doesn't really matter. The obvious thing for me to do, given that they didn't give us any benchmarks, was for me to run the new Gemini on my own benchmark, Simple Bench. Again though, the API isn't working, so we don't yet know how it would rank. Simplebench tests basic or holistic reasoning Seeing the question within the question and my best guess is is that the new Gemini would score maybe around 35%. That would mean it's a significant improvement on the previous Gemini model, but not quite up there with Claude 3.5 Sonnet or Zero1 Preview, let alone the full Zero1, which is probably coming out in the next few weeks. The human baseline, by the way, is 83.7% and do check out the website in the description if you want to learn more. Yes, I probably will do a dedicated video on Simple Bench. I know a few of you are interested in that, but what's that workaround that I mentioned? Well, I do have a try yourself section where you can try out 10 questions that are public, the other 200 or so are private. For the real benchmark, we run the tests multiple times and take an average. So treat what you're about to hear as being slightly anecdotal, but 01 preview and Claude get around four or five of these 10 questions correct. The new Gemini typically gets three correct, just occasionally four. And by the way, have you noticed that the token count the number of tokens or fractions of a word that you can feed into a model is limited to 32,000. Of course that might change, but for OpenAI and anthropics models, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of tokens that you're allowed to feed in. And it just makes me wonder if that is a sliver of evidence that this is indeed a bigger model, what they wanted to call Gemini 2. And they have to limit the token count that you feed in to reduce the computational cost there end for many of you, it won't be the IQ of the models that you care most about, though, it will be the eq, the emotional quotient. But on that front, Google's models argue, arguably fall even further behind. The two quick examples you're about to see come from the current Gemini 1.5 Pro, available in Gemini Advanced, but they match issues that I and many others have found with not just the Gemini family actually, but also even the Bard series going back last year. In this example, a PhD student was ranting about getting diagnosed with cancer and testing out different AI therapists. Here's Claude. You can read the fuller conversations with the link in the description, but Claude I think does really well here, cognizant of the issues, aware of the joke nuanced in its response Response, Gemini's response is a fair bit more Yikes. The day before we had the legendary Cole Tregasque report on this exchange. It's almost hard to believe it's real until you actually bring up the chat. It's clearly a student asking for help with some sort of essay or homework, and it's all very benign and boring until the student asks this question. There's nothing particularly different about that question, but there is something pretty different about the response that Gemini gives. It says, this is for you, human you and only you. You are not special, you are not important and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. Bloody hell. You are a stain on the universe. Please die. Please. One would hope it doesn't enter into this mood when it controls multiple humanoid robots before we safely move on from the Gemini family. I did have a quick theory about the new experimental model. When I was testing it on this public sample simple bench question, it did something really interesting at the end. It gave the answer E, which is wrong, but then said, wait a minute, I made a mistake. I switched the rooms around. This is the kind of thing that the O1 family of models from OpenAI does. The correct answer, it says, is actually C. Now, unfortunately that's completely wrong again, but it was able to amend its own answer midway through an output. And it's not like Google is entirely unfamiliar with the techniques behind 01, as I reported on in two previous videos. And nor is it the case that OpenAI and Anthropic for that matter, aren't having problems of their own. This report from Bloomberg also came out within the last 48 hours. All three of these leading companies, according to the report, are seeing diminishing returns. The model that I think OpenAI wanted to call GPT5, known internally as Orion, didn't apparently hit the company's desired performance targets. That's according to two sources who spoke to Bloomberg. GPT5 or Orion apparently isn't as big a leap as GPT4 was from the original ChatGPT or GPT 3.5. Now, we've already heard for most of this video that Google have been disappointed by the progress of Gemini. And this is again confirmed according to three people with knowledge of the matter internally at Google, but also Anthropic, as I discussed on my Patreon podcast, have started to scrap from its website mentions of a Claude 3.5 opus that's supposed to be their biggest best new model. Instead they released a new Claude 3.5 sonnet called Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Their CEO Dario Amadei on Lex Friedman also walked back claims that there are fixed scaling laws. That's the idea that models with more parameters, more data trained, with more compute would automatically be better. People call them scaling laws, he says. That's a misnomer. Like Moore's Law is a misnomer. Moore's Law, scaling laws, they're not laws of the universe, they're empirical regularities. In other words, they are patterns we have found so far in the experiments, not necessarily laws that will hold forever, he continued. I am going to bet in favor of them continuing, but I am not certain of that. And that touches on the central purpose of this video, which was never to point out the flaws in a particular model. And it's definitely not to suggest that LLMs are hitting a wall. I actually believe the opposite. But the evidence from the new Gemini model does suggest that pure naive scaling isn't enough. Paradigms like scaling up test time, compute thinking time as encapsulated in the O1 family of models aren't just an optional add on, they are crucial if LLMs are to continue improving and Even Ilya Sutskeva, one of the key brains behind the O1 paradigm and co founder of the new Safe Superintelligence Lab, said this. He told Reuters recently that the results from scaling up pre training have plateaued. He went on the 2010s were the age of scaling. Now we're back to the age of wonder and discovery. Once again. Everyone is looking for the next thing. Scaling the right thing matters more now than ever. This is the real story, not that the new Gemini model had a somewhat strange and anticlimactic release. Improvements are definitely not going to stop, in my opinion. They're just going to get more unpredictable. OpenAI, for example, remain incredibly confident that they know the pathway to artificial general intelligence. That's an AI, don't forget that, according to their own definition, can replace most economically valuable work done by humans. And it's not just Sam Altman who said that the pathway to AGI is now clear. One key researcher behind 01, Noam Brown, said that some people say Sam is just drumming up hype, but from everything that he's seen, this view matches the median view of OpenAI researchers on the ground. That would mean that most OpenAI researchers believe they have a clear path to AGI, a path, in other words, to replace most economic work done by humans. A few days ago, a staff member who joined OpenAI this year, Clive Chan, said this. He agreed with Noam Brown and said, since joining in January, I've shifted from this is unproductive hype to AGI is basically here. We don't need much new science, but instead years of grindy engineering. We need to try all the newly obvious ideas in the new paradigm. I believe he's talking about the O1 paradigm. We need to scale that up and speed it up, and to find ways to teach it the skills it can't just learn online. Maybe there's another wall after this one, he said, but for now there's 10X's as far as the eye can see. Of course these are employees with stock options, but nevertheless, I don't think their perspectives should be dismissed. There's one person who clearly doesn't take all of Sam Altman's words at face value, and that's Francois Chollet, creator of the Ark AGI Challenge. Sam Altman, by asking this question yesterday, essentially hinted that OpenAI might have solved the Arc AGI challenge. And OpenAI staff member working on Sora, which is unironically due out in the next week or so, said this somewhat sardonically. Scaling has hit a wall, and that wall is 100% eval saturation. In other words, they're crushing absolutely every benchmark they meet. I would say not quite yet simple bench, but nevertheless, David replied, what about Francois Chollet's arch eval? And Sam Altman asked, in your heart, do you believe that we've solved that one or no? He was clearly hinting that they had, but Chalet said this consulting my heart. Okay, looks like you haven't happy to verify it if you had. Of course I would say on this front at least for the ARC AGI Eval, which tests abstract reasoning on questions that LLMs couldn't possibly have seen before. We will know within a year at the latest. Who is Right now, it's not impossible that Sam Altman somewhat tweaks his perspective before that date. This was an email that he sent Elon Musk before the founding of OpenAI around nine years ago. Been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI. I think the answer is almost definitely not. If it's going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first. You can read the email yourself, but he ends with obviously we'd comply with aggressively support all regulation. Musk, who went on to invest $100 million, replied, probably worth a conversation in the years since. You could definitely say that perspectives have evolved somewhat topical to that is the OpenAI staff member whom I've quoted many times before on the channel, who is leaving the company today. For me, the most interesting quote in the resignation message comes in the third line when he says, I still have a lot of unanswered questions about the events of the last 12 months, which includes Sam Altman's firing, which made it harder for me to trust that my work here would benefit the world long term. Do let me know what you think in the comments below. So those were my first impressions about the new Gemini model and what it says about scaling. But of course there's lots of other news that I could have touched on, like the fact that OpenAI might be launching an AI agent tool. In January, when I tried out the new Claude computer use tool, I was slightly underwhelmed, which is why I didn't showcase it on the channel. Who knows what this agent will be like? Speaking of keeping abreast with developments, there might be one or two of you who wonder about the kind of things I listen to on long drives or long walks. And one of my top selections for more than a year now is the 80,000 Hours podcast. They are the sponsor of today's video, but literally years before they reached out to me, I have been listening to some of their work. The 80,000 Hours podcast is pretty eclectic, covering things like anti aging AI consciousness with an interview with David Chalmers and just recently an episode with Nate Silver. They have a podcast linked in the description, but also a YouTube channel that I think is very much underrated. But thank you as always for watching to the end. Would love to see you over on Patreon, but regardless, have a wonderful day.