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points by javierhonduco 1 day ago | 0 comments

Would love to know from a Googler if this is the #1 model that Google engineers use for coding or if they rely on 3rd parties.

[–] brainwad 1 day ago

People I work with either use the dogfood versions of our models, the latest public versions thereof, or Opus 5.5. It's a personal preference thing, we have public usage dashboards and you can see some people are 100% Gemini, some are 100% Claude, some are using both.

[–] ur-whale 1 day ago

> some people are 100% Gemini, some are 100% Claude, some are using both.

Does that mean Anthropic now has a copy of Google's source code?

[EDIT]: thanks to people in the know for their answers.

Follow-up question:

if Anthropic models run in a Google cage, does that not also mean Google can distill Anthropic models even easier (both fast and unseen)?

[–] rfw300 1 day ago

Google offers Anthropic models hosted on GCP through their Agent Platform (fka Vertex AI) - presumably any internal Anthropic use never crosses the Google boundary.

[–] ashdksnndck 1 day ago

> if Anthropic models run in a Google cage, does that not also mean Google can distill Anthropic models even easier (both fast and unseen)?

Anthropic is indeed trusting Google and other companies they rent compute from. Distilling or stealing the weights would be a contract violation, and would wreck other business relationships. I would be less worried about Google doing this, and more concerned if there is some sketchy neocloud in a van offering suspiciously low pricing.

[–] brainwad 1 day ago

AIUI our Claude traffic runs on GCP and so never "leaves the building".

[–] tonfa 1 day ago

> if Anthropic models run in a Google cage, does that not also mean Google can distill Anthropic models even easier (both fast and unseen)?

Not really in the interest of the cloud org to allow that, they don't really care how well deepmind is doing as long as they can sell TPU and API (incl. reselling openai and anthropic).

[–] iamdelirium 1 day ago

No, GCP has been selling Anthropic models for a while (and soon to be OpenAI models).

[–] owkman 1 day ago

Other comments on this already, so this is more of a confirmation.

I'm not going to comment on others use of Carbon except to say some article that came out before Argon's external launch saying Googlers hate it was nonsense. Not to say everyone loved it all the time.

I use Carbon heavily and am quite happy with it. For complex designs I may have it and Opus iterate back and forth on the design. They have their own strengths and Opus 5.5 is great, but I use Gemini far more than I do Opus at this point. I know a lot of the jagged edges of Gemini better than Opus though, so take that as you will.

[–] yegle 1 day ago

I personally use 3.8 Flash most of the time and Argon/Carbon when I need to do deep analysis or research an ambiguous problem. Opus/Fable is used when I need a second/third opinion.

3.8 Flash + /boost is very capable.

[–] wasabi991011 1 day ago

What does /boost do?

And do you have advice on how best to use Gemini models? It seems like my usual strategy of iterating on plan md file -> implement based on plan doesn't seem to work, 3.8 tends to rewrite the plan too often removing crucial parts when iterating.

[–] bitexploder 22 hours ago

I have ended up using Argon more and more. If you keep it grounded it is a great model. Extremely thorough. A little slow. It feels like it gets things done better than Opus 5.5. It slowly churns through everything. Not necessarily quality but its adherence to goals seems better and it takes less prompting.

For cyber use cases I am absolutely blown away. Can’t say much more, but it is a serious model.

Just my opinions. I really recommend people take it seriously. For many jobs I just prefer it now. It is a new model so it needs time. Opus 5.5 is a sweet spot as well. I use both extensively.

[–] alex_duf 1 day ago

I don't think a big ai lab like Deep Mind would accept leaking their IP to their competitors so that their engineers can use code completion and generation.

[–] vinni2 1 day ago

From what I heard from a Googler, Claude models are still the most popular for coding internally but it’s a couple of month old info so take it with a grain of salt.

[–] slipshady 1 day ago

Googlers got access to Claude like one month ago.

[–] mattlondon 1 day ago

From what I've heard they have been using it since at least Opus 4.6, if not earlier

[–] brainwad 1 day ago

It was locked down to GDM only for several months, but now it's available for everyone.

[–] surajrmal 1 day ago

They are not the most popular.

[–] eddd-ddde 1 day ago

Personally, any of the flash options is my default most times because it tends to perform tasks faster and with the same level of success.