Gemini, get your act together

Google's Gemini Carbon model, released two weeks after its announcement, delivered a time to first token of 165 seconds and throughput under 20 tokens per second in an OpenRouter request log from a coding session, according to a first-person test account published by alsado.ca. The author reported degraded performance across most of two days of testing, with one exception at 12am Mountain Time reaching roughly 30 tokens per second and a 10-second TTFT, and compared it unfavorably to Claude Fable 5.2, which the author says comes from a five-year-old company that is not a top-three cloud provider. The author concluded there is still no path to adopting Gemini models for work requiring reliable intelligence in 2026.

Two weeks after announcing Gemini Carbon, Google has finally made it available to users. Their benchmarks were, as always, impressive: A model which outperforms Claude Fable 5.1 on every benchmark? I need to try this… Yes, waiting two weeks after announcement to release a model in this industry is long, unheard of even. BUT, on the bright side, it’s probably a polished model now, ready to be served, right?? The above is an OpenRouter request log from one of my sessions, where I was trying to use Carbon for some light coding tasks and evals. It shows the Carbon’s performance across turns, notably with a: - Time to First Token TTFT of 165s - Throughput < 20 tok/s That’s insane. Unusable. Embarrassing even. I’ve never seen any model perform like this. Mind you I’m using OpenRouter, which routes to the best provider at that time. This degraded performance is unfortunately not a one-off. Across my testing in the past two days, I’ve experienced poor performance for this model during most of my testing. One notable exception was a session I had at 12am mountain time last night where I got average performance, ~30 tok/s, 10s TTFT Compare that with Fable 5.2, a model released by a company which: - has order of magnitude less experience in infrastructure than Google - has been in business for 5 years compare to Google’s 28 - ISN’T A TOP 3 CLOUD PROVIDER p50 mind you… Never mind all the usual Gemini bugs, which somehow still haven’t gone away see gemini article https://alsado.ca/posts/gemini/ . In 2026, I still don’t see a path where I could adopt Gemini models for anything requiring reliable intelligence. Looks like Bidaya’s Vertex AI credits are gonna go unused, too bad.