Google Invented the Transformer, So Why Does Gemini Still Feel Like a Chore?

Shay_Solomon · reddit · 2026-09-24

A Reddit post asks why Gemini, despite Google's compute, data, and inventing the Transformer, keeps getting outpaced in everyday tasks by open-weight models like DeepSeek and Qwen.

The author points to three causes: benchmark strength that doesn't survive real-world edge cases and complex code; safety rails so tight they suffocate usefulness; and corporate bloat that ships like a committee while lean labs iterate fast. Developers care about consistency and clean execution, not giant context windows — and the post wonders if Google is repeating Xerox PARC's fate of inventing the future for others to harvest.

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