[bluegatty]

Yup, you got it. It's a weird situation for sure.

You know what's also weird: Gem3 'Pro' is pretty dumb.

OAI has 'thinking levels' which work pretty well, it's nice to have the 'super duper' button - but also - they have the 'Pro' product which is another model altogether and thinks for 20 min. It's different than 'Research'.

OAI Pro (+ maybe Spark) is the only reason I have OAI sub. Neither Anthropic nor Google seem to want to try to compete.

I feel for the head of Google AI, they're probably pulled in major different directions all the time ...

[visarga]

If you want that level of research I suggest you ask the model to draft a markdown plan with "[ ]" gates for todo items, and plan it in as many steps as needed. Then ask another LLM to review the plan, judge it. In the end use the plan as the execution state tracker, the model solves one by one the checkboxes.

Using this method I could recreate "deep research" mode on a private collection of documents in a few minutes. A markdown file can be like a script or playbook, just use checkboxes for progress. This works for models that have file storage and edit tools, which is most, starting with any coding agent.

[bluegatty]

OAI Pro is not a 'research' tool in that sense, and it's definitely different than the 'deep research' options avail on most platforms, as I indicated.

It's a different kind of solution altogether.

I suggest trying it.

[jswny]

Can you explain what’s so different about pro?

I’ve used everything frontier model and had Pro a while ago but it seemed to just be the same models served faster at the time.

[bluegatty]

It's a different model and designed to 'think very hard' about issues. It's basically a 'very extended thinking mixed with research' type of solution.

While the 'research' solutions tend to go very wide and come back with a 'paper' the Pro model seems to do an exhaustive amount of thinking combined with research, and tries to integrate findings. I think it goes down a lot of rabbit holes.

I find it's by far the best way to find solutions to hard problems, but it typically does require a 'hard problem' in order to shine.

And it takes an enormous amount of time. Ito could be essentially a form of 'saturating the problem with tokens'. It's OAI's most expensive model by far. A prompt usually costs me $1-3 if paying per token.