How cooked is Gemini?

Max Kan: Gemini is Cooked but GCP is Cooking

For all intents and purposes, we believe DeepMind is no longer a frontier lab.

I think this is being a bit overdramatic. It is true that there's been a good amount of executive shakeup and that the company has failed to release any semblance of a frontier model in all of 2026. That's an eon in this industry right now, but Google could come out with something extremely impressive any day now and change the narrative. How often has the narrative shifted over the past couple years of who was winning, who was losing, who was dead?

I'm not arguing that all of the cynicism around Google's delivery of Gemini models this year is wrong. Just that until they throw in the towel like Apple did earlier this year, ironically, by going all in on Gemini, I wouldn't count anyone out. It was barely a month ago, people were talking about how XAI was just going to sell its server capacity going forward, and now they've released Grok 4.6, which appears to be pretty darn good (obviously, Fuck Elon Musk).