Nils Durner's Blog Ahas, Breadcrumbs, Coding Epiphanies

Gemini 3 Pro

The much anticipated Google release of Gemini 3 has yielded Gemini 3 Pro (blog post) for developers - the biggest of their Gemini variants, without the smaller Flash and Flash Lite variants. The Model Card is pretty light on details and is only 8 pages long. In short, it appears to be a powerful, very expensive, agentic reasoning language model.... Read more...

Notes from the Google Gen AI Intensive Course

Course whitepaper Definitions - Recurring core definition: The Model = The “Brain”. Tools = “Hands” and “Eyes”. Orchestration Layer = “Nervous System”. Deployment = “Body” and “Legs” Recurring core definition: The Model = The “Brain”. Tools = “Hands” and “Eyes”. Orchestration Layer = “Nervous System”. Deployment = “Body” and “Legs” Read more...

Kimi K2 Thinking

Chinese Lab Moonshot AI has released a reasoning text-only LLM. Following Sebastian Raschka, K2 Thinking architecturally seems like a scaled up version of DeepSeek R1 in certain ways, e.g. the 1 trillion parameters (1T vs 671B) or the larger context size (256K vs. 128K). Writing K2 Thinking scores below the non-thinking variant, K2 Instruct, on ... Read more...

Google AI Mode: Availability & Limitations

Google’s chatbot “AI Mode” is available in the EU - at least partially: Germany works, but one commenter on X reported hitting access restriction from France. The official list of supported countries is published here. It can be reached either through google.com/ai on the “AI Mode” (🇩🇪 “KI-Modus”) button on google.com straight. It’s free of cost... Read more...

Google Veo 3.1

Google’s new video generation model Veo 3.1 is now available, marked as “Preview” in the Google Vertex AI Studio. Google AI Studio still only offers Veo 2. Third parties LetzAI and RunwayML offer Veo 3.1, but don’t include the “Preview” moniker in their model selectors - it remains unclear if it’s the same or a different model. In my one single ... Read more...