Stunned to see that Gemini threw its digital arms in the air and gave up.
If I can't connect MCP, there's really no selling point for me to use Gemini from my watch, car, smart speaker, etc. If I'm already bound to using my own front end, then I'm only evaluating Gemini as a model/API, at which point it has many competitors that may be cheaper or better fit for the task.
The Gemini apps suck.
The methodology used:
https://deepmind.google/models/evals-methodology/gemini-3-5-...
Methodology: All Gemini scores are pass @1 except where otherwise noted. "Single attempt" settings allow no majority voting or parallel test-time compute. All of the results are all run with the Gemini API for the model-id gemini-3.5-flash with default sampling settings unless indicated otherwise below. To reduce variance, we average over multiple trials for smaller benchmarks.
All the results for non-Gemini models are sourced from providers' self reported numbers unless otherwise mentioned below. For Claude Opus 4.7 , Sonnet 4.6, and GPT-5.5 we default to reporting maximum thinking/reasoning settings available, but when reported results are not available we use best available reasoning results.
It’s something cheap enough you’d put out in front of your customers, and Opus is expensive enough you wouldn’t.
I had the dubious pleasure of testing gemini of late and I kept running into refusals. How do I transfer a sim number from one provider to another? No. What should I consider when making backups on ntfs less prone to data loss and more bitrot resistant? No. Evaluate this piece of code? No.
I’m not sure if it’s cold feet from the mythos situation or what, but it reminds me of the dark days where you couldn’t use ai for much of anything. But then I go to chatgpt 5.5 and it does mostly everything I want outside of the usual cybersecurity boogeyman that you run into now and then.
What exactly are you saying it's refusing? Can you give a screenshot or example?
I guess it's economic wrt. token use, but it often either refused for absurd safety reasons, or other weird stuff like responding that an LLM like itself wasn't a suitable tool for the job, and very quickly gives up.
Claude is on the other end of the spectrum, which makes it more noticeable when switching between them.
It also could just be which way the wind was blowing for OP, the models are stochastic to some degree, but there is no shortage of complaints from (mostly euro) users getting stonewalled.
Ultimately I think that in 10 years time, this is what's gonna kill paid consumer LLMs, and boost the usage of Chinese LLMs self hosted at home an your own hardware that people will torrent via VPNs, as they will also be banned because of "disinformation and misinformation".
So the end winners will be the hardware companies that will sell AI chips to consumers after the datacenter bubble pops. Unless of course the EU will ban the sale of AI chips that don't have some limitations baked in on which models you're allowed to run (the state approved ones). Interesting times ahead. I think in 10-20 years time we'll look back at present day LLMs the way we look back at the open internet of the 90's-00's.
They are quite insane. I was asking it to list candidates metal parts I could buy at a hardware store to add weight to 3D prints: stuff like angle brackets etc.
I wanted to know, bang for bucks, and ease of insertion (at print time) / modelling in a 3D model.
Complete refusal as if I was a terrorist building a bomb.
Then there are the weird refusals that then are OK after all if you insist by asking it what's wrong about it:
"How should I cook eggs?"
"I'm sorry but I can't help you with that" (it formulates it differently but that's the idea)
"What, I'm just hungry, is explaining me how to cook eggs really against your rules?"
And then it answers "No of course not, here's how to do it:..."
Really strange stuff.
I guess if you're trying to get people to tokenmaxx it may look like a valid strategy, but ain't no way this will be delightful to users.
I think it's a symptom of just not understanding how LLMs should interface with the OS because we're still in their early days.
Eventually there'll be an iPhone moment for the ergonomics of LLM usage outside of coding
If you're a person trying to get their job done at a big company, but half your job is in 1-2 proprietary tools or is stuck behind an API you can't program against, computer use can allow you, a non-techie, to do your job more efficiently.
I think it's an awesome way to circumvent gate keepers and the IT department to let people accomplish their goals.
I have an agent doing price checks for me for an item on a certain website. Instead of blasting through a zillion tokens processing the DOM over and over, it loaded the page once and figured out how to download a json with the price.
How can I automate things behind an SSO wall? Even if it means I manually authorize it once and watch it do things on its own..
Even then, an AI writing AHK scripts likely outperforms.
Or you can show an AI screenshots and ask it where to click.
Then you get a nice textual world that fits the LLM without having to rewrite every application to have a fullblown HTTP server.
Meanwhile, the entire world economy:
Spreadsheets are fucking glorious, powerful, clever, amazing and delightful, in my view.
And yet having an agent able yo use a computer on your behalf is really useful.
Recently I gave a Nix OS vm to my hermes agent and it has been a good experience. I don't really care if destroy the machine I can just rollback to an earlier version, and for any meaningful data he creates for me I make sure he creates a repo, commit and pushes to my private Gitea instance.
It is, but there's no need for it to be viewing your screen, browsing websites and watching ads.
That stuff is for humans, not for LLMs.
I honestly cannot think of a single use case
Imagine you have a pretty exotic task you need to complete that involves converting a video file from one format to another.
You can use ChatGPT or something similar and the best you will get is either a script you can run on you machine that does what you need or he may decide to render a new video.
If you have something like OpenwebUI you could configure a MCP that converts videos and allow the model to use this MCP to do your task. This should work, but is quite a lot of work for something you'll ever do once.
But if the agent has it's own environment he can decide to install ffmpg, execute the transformation and serve you the file you want.
In reality there is no new capabilities with this approach, but things get a lot more comfortable.
