Nathan Lambert: preference

Transcript context

…By the way, I don’t know if there’s a representative case: wife waiting in the car, you have to run, unplug the GPU, you have to generate a Bash script. This sounds like a movie… …Mission Impossible. I use Gemini for that. I use thinking for all the information stuff and then Gemini for fast things or stuff that I could sometimes Google. It’s good at explaining things and I trust that it has this background of knowledge and it’s simple. And the Gemini app has gotten a lot better. It’s good for those sorts of things. And then for code and any sort of philosophical discussion, I use Claude Opus 4.5, also always with extended thinking. Extended thinking and inference-time scaling is just a way to make the models marginally smarter. I will always edge on that side when the progress is very high because you don’t know when that’ll unlock a new use case. And then I sometimes use Grok for real-time information or finding something on AI Twitter that I knew I saw and I need to dig up. Although when Grok 4 came out, the Grok 4 Heavy—which was their pro variant—was actually very good and I was pretty impressed with it, and then I just kind of lost track of it with muscle memory from having the ChatGPT app open. So I use many different things. Yeah. I actually do use Grok 4 Heavy for debugging. For hardcore debugging that the other ones can’t solve, I find that it’s the best at. And it’s interesting because you say ChatGPT is the best interface. For me, for that same reason—but this could be just momentum— Gemini is the better interface for me. I think because I fell in love with their needle-in-the-haystack capabilities. If I ever put in something that has a lot of context but I’m looking for very specific information to make sure it tracks all of it, I find Gemini has been the best. So it’s funny with some of these models, if they win your heart over— …for one particular feature on a particular day, for that particular query or prompt, you’re like, “This model’s better.” And so you’ll just stick with it for a bit until it does something really dumb. There’s like a threshold effect. Some smart thing happens and then you fall in love with it, and then it does some dumb thing and you’re like, “You know what? I’m gonna switch and try Claude or ChatGPT.” And all that kind of stuff.…

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