Gemini 3.5 Flash (opens in new tab)

That pelican looks like it's in Miami for a crypto conference.

This is a perfect illustration of something I noticed with llm progress. Ask them to improve an svg like this, and it never fixes the missing crossbar or disconnected limbs, it just adds more stuff. In this example they have obviously improved greatly, and it contains a ridiculous amount of detail, but they still to get the basic shape of the frame wrong. It's weird. And the pattern shows up everywhere, try it with a webpage and it will add more buttons and stuff. I've even experimented with feeding the broken pelican svgs to an image model to look for flaws, and they still fail to spot the broken elements.

edit: fixed human hallucination

Forgetting the chainstay is typical of asking random people to draw a bicycle.

https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/

> most ended up drawing something that was pretty far off from a regular men’s bicycle

I feel like it embodies Google's vibe of an uncool guy trying to stay relevant to the youth pretty well.

I'm told there is a new Jeff Dean fact inside google: "Jeff Dean manually adjusts the weights in the model just to screw with Simon".

If you sort that table by "output token price", it gets really terrifying - going from 4 cents up to $600 =8-O

Love your pelicans, as always. And that one is... Wow.

I noticed the "Synthwave" aesthetic, which is enjoying quite some success since quite some time now, has found its way into AI models (even when it's not in the user's query). It's not the first time I see the sun at sunset with color bands etc. in AI-generated pictures. Don't know why it's now taking on in AI too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthwave

Hence the comments here about the 90s, Sonny Crockett's white Ferrari Testarossa in Miami, etc.

To be honest as a kid from the 80s and a teenager from the 90s who grew up with that aesthetic in posters, on VHS tape covers, magazine covers, etc. I do love that style and I love that it made a comeback and that that comeback somehow stayed.

Same old issue with Gemini models trying to "enrich" everything

We've been daily-driving this model for a few weeks and let me tell you, everything it does is a lot. Fast as fuck and it's actually not bad intelligence-wise for a fast model. It basically tries to make up for any intelligence deficit by just doing a lot, checking a lot, retrying a lot.

That's not to say I don't spend my days raging at it... a lot... but it's not that bad. It does tend to ignore completion criteria but it doesn't obviously degrade when being nudged like some models do.

'Pelicans' should be the unit of measurement for model prices, rather than tokens.

I'm hoping we'll have many of these pelican cyclist pictures collected. Then when all the models can do it well, we'll stop posting about them, and dhen the next generations of AIs train on the data we'll have these canonical archetypes.

That sun is very similar to the one from the background of this other top HN post about the OS museum: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48195009

I've found prompts like "capybara with spotted fur and 7 octopus tentacles instead of legs, each a different color, riding a tricycle" etc. to be a better test

Last time I tried, ChatGPT's image generator got the best result.

I enjoy the vaporwave aesthetic it went for. Looks like the pelican has a fish in its mouth too?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave

Wow what’s with all the styling? Is it manifestation of google’s styling bias? I like the result for sure. It’s shiny and pretty. But then it’s something I didn’t ask for.

I can’t help but think that what AI is best at is convincing management that things it creates are full featured which reads to their brains as mature

Wouldn't be a thread about the tech that is changing the landscape for businesses across nearly every discipline without a pelican svg.

I wonder if they added all these unrequested details as an Easter-egg or something? (Since they must be aware of your test by now).

The fact it went for vaporwave styling on its own is very telling.

`<!-- Pelican Eye / Sunglasses (Cool Retro Aviators) -->`

wtf

`<!-- Gold Rim -->`

WTF??

funny that when I try the same prompt, gemini generates an image, not an SVG. something is not right.

They are just trolling you now

Beats a human by like 10$

at a certain point you're gonna need to change your benchmark because this will end up in the model's training set

Given your pelican is very famous now, don't you think they are adding instructions to beat this benchmark those days?

This understates the cost increase. 3.5 Flash also uses more tokens. artificialanalysis.ai shows these difference to run the whole eval, which I think is more realistic pricing:

Gemini 2.5 flash (27 score): $172 (1.0x)

Gemini 2.5 pro (35 score): $649 (3.8x)

Gemini 3.0 Flash (46 score): $278 (1.6x)

Gemini 3.5 Flash (55 score): $1,552 (9.0x or 2.4x compared to 2.5 pro)

This is a massive price increase... 5.6x compared to Gemini 3.0 Flash

They probably never intended to keep serving cheap models. This is a natural way to introduce the squeeze, now that they have people who built services on their API. It makes a lot of sense to have an abstraction layer where the provider doesn't matter. If you are working in Kotlin, Koog is excellent.

If Google is actually getting cheaper inference than everyone else with their TPUs, this smells like trouble to me. Maybe serving LLMs at a profit is proving difficult.

Or maybe they think because their benchmarks are good they can ramp up the prices. Seems like they don’t have the market share to justify a move like that yet to me.

We need another "Deepseek moment" or else it will become impossible for the regular dude to use AI. It will become something that only big companies can afford.

3.5 flash is listed as stable rather than preview, or am I misreading?

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/models/gemini-3.5-flas...

> Interesting pricing direction.

Is it? More capability, more demand, higher price. Seems relatively uninteresting. The naming structure complicates it: 3.5 Flash is less comparable to 3.0 Flash than it is to 3.0 Pro.

More generally, $/token + naming scheme comparisons are just confusing: I am not looking for a wordy idiot and I doubt most people are (at least not with what I would consider worthwhile business ambitions). In fact wordy idiots are fairly costly, because we have to consider the large amounts of cheap garbage that they are producing, and if you price your own time somewhat competitively then fairly quickly that's the bigger lever.

Even if we don't consider the last part: How do we price the better model, that can one shot a task without having to go back and forth and spending more tokens or having to fix more bugs later? It is definitely worth something and I think it's quite undervalued right now. What seems to be missing is a better measurement of capability per token. I don't know how that could look like. Maybe something like how we try and measure inflation, some basket of tasks (which then ends up being part of the training data so idk).

3.1 flash lite — $0.25/$1.50 — plus insanely fast.

3.1 flash lite isn’t quite as good as 3 flash preview (which is the most incredible cheap model… I really love it) — but 3.1 is half the price and the insane speed opens up different use cases.

For comparison, Opus models are $5/$25

To be fair, Gemini 3.1 flash _lite_ supports structured output (guaranteed json), it’s super fast, runs circles around 2.5 flash and costs $0.25/$1.50.

I use it _a lot_ and it’s very capable if you just plan correctly. I actually almost exclusively use 3.1 flash lite and 2.5 flash lite (even cheaper) and we have 99.5% accuracy in what we do.

That said, I think we’ll see the lite/flash models and the pro models will diverge more price wise. The pro models will become more and more expensive.

It might be temporary pricing given that 3.5 Flash is actually superior to the existing 3.1 Pro in almost all regards, so they're in a bit of a lurch as 3.1 Pro really doesn't make sense given that 3.5 Pro has been delayed a bit.

Their rationale might be that it’s size and intelligence are growing relative to the market.

Fwiw it’s beating Claude Sonnet in most benchmarking (benchmaxxing?), yet they’ve priced it almost half off on a per token basis.

Question is are you going to persuade anyone with this argument?

Are there many devs at Google who legit prefer Gemini over Claude and Codex? Would love to hear about that.

At the same time, it is supposedly Gemini 3.1 Pro level at 3/4 the price

and far cheaper than comparable models, Gemini Pro is cheaper than Claude Sonnet (Anthropic still gets to charge a brand premium)

I use Gemini models in Junie daily. When I need accuracy I switch to Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview (why it is still in preview?), but it burns thru credits leaving me topping up $5 every day. 3.1 Flash lite is just not accurate enough. 3 Flash is sweet spot just as Jetbrains suggests it is.

Maybe I'll look at Opus again, but it just was slower, much more expensive and worst at all - wasn't listening to you instructions.

I don't think they're really comparable. Seems they created the Flash-Lite tier to take the spot of the old Flash models.

In general, Gemini flash is still relatively cheaper compared to the "mini" version of the other big 2. However, I agree that newer version seem to have multiple X price increase (similar to the new ChatGPT) and we certainly need competition from the open source models to keep these guys in check with pricing.

I use Gemini for heavy web scraping-adjacent API work. Web grounding has been super useful for the project.

I will definitely not be updating to this new model, and I think once 2.5 Flash is deprecated I'll have to re-architect so Gemini is only used for web grounding requests. This is an insane price increase.

If you look at the benchmark, the model is not particularly good at coding, and as you point out it costs 3x the price of the previous flash models. So what is the market for it?

I think that they might have reached the latency sweetspot where voice applications become more natural. Natural speech is <100 tokens per second (after STT), so $9 for a million token takes you to roughly 3 hours of speech. That's totally competitive compared to human costs.

Gen AI is unprofitable, especially at the insanely cheap rates they've been offering to get people in the door. So expect more increases in the future.

Yeah, it is a massive jump in price, hardly a "Flash" model anymore... I wonder if they'll release flash lite or something with a bit more affordable price point.

And they are using this to power search answers?

To me this is almost like a tone-deaf naming change.

Empty Slot (new Pro as Mythos competitor?)

Old Pro -> now Flash

Old Flash -> now Flash Lite

Old Flash Lite -> now Gemma (and not served by Google)

I say "almost" because the situation is more fluid and unstable than a normal naming change. If Apple were to do this with laptops, maybe it'd be like, Air gets better and pricier and becomes Pro-level model, Neo same way becomes Air-level model, etc. But Apple's too design oriented to do something like that. Google, well...

This change has made me decide to move to a multi-provider situation like through OpenRouter for consumer-facing LLM api in a service I'm building. I just can't trust Google to not constantly rearrange everything under our feet. Doesn't mean I won't use Gemini, but it clearly means I need to have others in the mix ready to go. In fact I used to use lots of Flash Lite, which is now Gemma territory, and I can't get that served by Google anymore and don't want to run my own hardware.

But in any case, I'd compare this "Flash" model with previous "Pro" on all metrics. It's kinda like if in clothes a Small suddenly became what was a Large, or at Starbucks a Grande became the new de facto Venti. And only for the new! drinks.

And if we think this way, it's possible that prices are actually falling?

don't forget Gemini 2.0 flash at $0.10/$0.40

That's a lot. DeepSeek v4 Flash is just over a tenth the price, and DeepSeek v4 Pro is roughly the same price (currently heavily discounted, but will be $1.74).

I mean, the benchmarks for Gemini 3.5 Flash are very strong, but at those prices it has to be. I guess the time of subsidized tokens from the big guys is slowly coming to an end.

just subscribe to the plan, cheaper

Gemini 2.5 flash was the best Gemini model.

Not the most intelligent but perfect balance of cheap, fast and not-too-dumb.

We've been really impressed with the performance of ~30B parameter class models and how close they are to the frontier from ~6-12 months ago, which begs the question, are the frontier labs really serving 10T parameter models? Seems unlikely.

If these Gemini 3.5 numbers are accurate, then I'd wager GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.7 are a lot smaller than people have speculated, too. It's not that frontier labs can't create a 5T+ parameter model, but they don't have the data to optimize a model of that size.

Gemini 3.5 Flash is really smart in one-shot coding reasoning, btw. Near the frontier. But it doesn't do so well in long horizon agentic tasks with arbitrary tool availability. This is a common theme with Google models, and the opposite of what we see with Chinese models (start dumb, iterate consistently toward a smart solution).

Data at https://gertlabs.com/rankings

If two things hold up - 1) this is actually a 2-300B parameter model and 2) this is actually competitive with frontier OpenAI and Anthropic models (and not just benchmaxing), the implications are pretty big. It would mean you could run "frontier level" performance in one box at home.

300B models at least fit in a single maxed out Mac Studio or a small stack of DGX Sparks or AMD Strix Halo boxes.

For comparison, DeepSeek V4 Flash is all the rage now for small efficient models. It's very good for its size but far from the performance of the latest GPT Pro and Opus models. The vanilla variant has 284B parameters. It fits on both 256GB and 512GB Mac Studios and hits about 20-30 tokens/second.

The implication of all this here is that you could have a (somewhat sluggish) Opus in a small box at home. At least once competing models and hardware to run them will be available (high end Mac Studios have been discontinued).

Something tells me that this means that Google's performance numbers here are inflated.

Nice post! You piqued my curiosity, so after a bit of research it turns out that, with techniques like MTP/MLA/CSA, it's quite probable that these models are much more efficient (and maybe bigger? tho 400B sounds about right) than a simple RAM breakdown would suggest.

MTP - https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-...

MLA - https://machinelearningmastery.com/a-gentle-introduction-to-...

CSA - https://deepseek.ai/blog/deepseek-v4-compressed-attention

If this is accurate it raises the question: why is this model so expensive? DeepSeek v4 Flash is 284B total/13B active, FP4/FP8 mixed, and only costs $0.14/$0.28 - even less from OpenRouter. Of course Gemini 3.5 Flash is most likely a better product, and therefore it can command a higher price from an economics perspective, but does this imply Google is taking roughly a 90% profit margin on inference? If so they're either very compute-limited or confident in the model and wanting to recoup training/fixed costs (or both).

meta - i think that's the first time i've seen a table in a hn comment, and i'm surprised/impressed! nice

are these pre-generated in a different tool with plain unicode and then just copy-pasted, or is it a built-in feature of hn?

A nice estimate! Since „you can compress knowledge, but not factual knowledge” https://x.com/bojie_li/status/2049314403208896521, it is likely we can actualy measure its size.

The fact that this is running on tpus is a huge point. Counting those against the other available datacenter hardware used by others, it puts google at a huge advantage, and compute > * while scaling is still working

Tell me more about what your day looks like. What do you think of the LLMOps books from Abi, in case you have read it ? Any other resources you can recommed?

Do you have similar math for the flash-lite variant of the models? I'd be curious. Based on my testing / benchmark i think it's around the 100-120B mark.

With the Pro variant being around 600B - 800B

My testing is comparing it's performance / output to other models in the same size range, so not as scientific as yours.

given this, is it safe to assume that inference pricing is barely related to cost to serve at this point and there is considerable margin?

I like your chain of thought there !

i would like to get a job like that. what can i study? I am mostly a ml engineer / researcher.

Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Thinking High - 2,526 tokens:

https://gistpreview.github.io/?3496285c5dac5ba10ebbc0b201a1a...

Gemini 2.5 Pro - 5,325 tokens:

https://gistpreview.github.io/?cc5e0fefeaaffecd228c16c95e736...

Gemini 2.5 Flash - 7,556 tokens:

https://gistpreview.github.io/?263d6058fe526a62b8f270f0620ec...

Gemma 4 31B IT - 3,261 tokens via AI Studio:

https://gistpreview.github.io/?858a42b96af864859a3b89508619d...

Gemma 4 26B A4B IT - 4,034 tokens via AI Studio:

https://gistpreview.github.io/?4adb7703897e0c6b583f9de928e4a...

Opus 4.7

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/128ebe5a-add7-406a-9bce-6...

hesamation/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-Claude-4.6-Opus-Reasoning-Distilled-GGUF @ Q6_K

8112 tokens @ 52.97 TPS, 0.85s TTFT

https://gistpreview.github.io/?7bdefff99aca89d1bc12405323bd4...

Full session: https://gist.github.com/abtinf/7bdefff99aca89d1bc12405323bd4...

Generated with LM Studio on a Macbook Pro M2 Max

https://huggingface.co/hesamation/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-Claude-4.6...

Here is GPT 5.5 High thinking; I had to add a second follow up prompt "it's not animated though" as the first one was not animated.

https://gistpreview.github.io/?557f979c82701862bc26d24f10399...

All three links animate for me.

It’s shocking how much better 3.1 is than 3.5 flash

The benchmarks used don’t really give a full story

Can you try with a more complex story such as "three little pigs"? I tried but it created a storybook instead of the SVG animation. I am looking to partially imitate Godogen [1][2] which is really great, even for animations.

[1] https://github.com/htdt/godogen

[2] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ozZmWcSwieZQG0muYjbj7Xjhhlz...

These are hilarious. 3.5 Flash Thinking High is the only one that is weirdly deformed (what is going on with the hat in 3.1 Pro??)

3.5 Flash definitely got the synth wave vibe preference.

Your links are broken FYI.

People complain about them incessantly, but I can almost never get people to actually post receipts. Every provider allows sharing chats, and anyone can share a prompt that reliably produces hallucinations.

More often than not, people are using images in responses that go awry. Which is fair, the models are sold as multi-modal, but image analyses is still at gpt-4.0 text-analyses levels.

Also knowledge cutoff issues, where people forget the models exist months to a year or more in the past.

well there is https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience

I haven't been bothered by hallucinations in premier models since early last year. Still see it in smaller local models though.

> While OpenAI originally pioneered Codex (which went on to power GitHub Copilot), Google’s direct answer for dedicated, native code completion and natural-language-to-code generation is CodeGemma.

https://g.co/gemini/share/33e7a589a161

if last year's models were the ones people got familiar with in late 2022, hallucinations would be an underrepresented rumor, there would be no articles about it because its so rare. overconfident lawyers wouldn't have messed up dockets in court with fake case law, in other domains that move faster, sources would be only partially outdated with agentic search and mcp servers filling in the gaps

AI psychosis would be the problem people talk about more, not just outright agreement but subtle ways of making you feel confident in your ideas. "yes, buy that domain name buy these other ones for defensibility"

(the domain name is dumb and completely unmarketable)

As long as the model uses web search, they almost never hallucinate anymore. The fast models (haiku, gpt-instant, flash) still sometimes have the problem where they don't search before answering so they can hallucinate

maybe something like this? https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.v...

It really depends what you are asking it. If the answer is in the training data, then the odds of it lying to you are much lower than if you are asking it for something it has never seen before.

"Flash-Lite" is a different product from "Flash", which is more expensive. They couldn't be more confusing with their naming though, especially since they have 3.1 Pro and not 3.1 Flash non-lite.

I haven't used 3.5 at all yet, but previous Gemini (and Gemma models) are by far the most token light per task than any other model.

Cost per task is a more productive measure, but obviously a more difficult one to benchmark.

I wonder why they didn't discuss price in the post?

Compare to the GPT-5.5 announcement: https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-5/

I don't think input/output pricing matters, 90% of the cost is cache. $0.15 is pretty good, but still very expensive.

[deleted]

Very little of what made the Flash culture so fun made its way into HTML5.

The Flash designer was really nice. One thing the web kind of set back was all the RAD tools from the 90s and 2000s.

They were CPU killers but man those Flash websites were gorgeous (talking mostly about MU Online "private" servers)

You're not the only one... Heck, I hear Flash and I say Macromedia in my head :/

I guess I'm slightly younger: I think "weights or it didn't happen"!

Frontpage, Dreamviewer, flash, photoshop lol. We are old.

Lol. Young uns!

Flash, ah, ah, saviour of the universe. Flash, ah, ah, he'll save every one of us!

Every time I have heard the word flash for goodness knows how many years.

Same here, and worst because in another thread users are generating animations.

Given the cost increase associated with this model, and previous model releases, I think the size is trending upwards, not down.

Don’t let that fool yourself. Google will have SOTA models as big as or even bigger than their competitors.

They are just refining their current models while they finish training the next generation.

They will all come out at about the same time. Anthropic, OpenAi, Google, xAI

> Engineers at google have publically stated that the models are too big and are far from their potencial

Can you link to a source?

Source please cause i dont believe that for once second

I mean, yes and no.

Nobody really knows the answer to which one is more optimal

* Large model trained on a large amount of data across multiple domains, that doesn't need any extra content to answer questions.

* Smaller model that is smart enough to go fetch extra relevant content, and then operate on essentially "reformatting" the context into an answer.

Google’s pro models are almost certainly bigger than Openai’s lol

You’re quoting the batch pricing. On demand is 1.5 per input and 9 per M output. This is effectively comparable cost to Gemini 2.5 Pro in a flash tier model

I think you have your pricing wrong there, Gemini 3.5 flash is $1.50 input and $9 output.

You are seeing batch inference, standard inference is $1.5/$9. I was excited until I saw that price.

Standard pricing is showing for me as $1.50 / $9.

(I suspect you're viewing the "flex" pricing).

In addition to people pointing out your LLM got the pricing wrong,

> The pricing and "including thinking tokens" framing position it as a reasoning-capable flash model rather than just a pure speed optimization

Every Gemini model starting with 2.5 has been a reasoning model.

Please delete/edit your AI-written and factually wrong post.

Ouch. That's going in completely the wrong direction.

How many people complain that we have too much low quality AI output for humans to read, let alone evaluate vs. how many people are complaining that they want higher quality, more trustworthy output?

Seems like the only good thing about 3.5 Flash is its speed. Not cost-competitive or benchmark-leading by any means.

How do they calculate that?

3.1 has 57M output tokens from Intelligence Index, 3.5 Flash has 73M, so not a lot more, and 3.5 is a bit cheaper, I don't get how 3.5 can be 74% more expensive.

>3.5 Flash was more expensive than 3.1 Pro to run the Artifical Analysis test suite

That's everything I needed to know.

That's what I came here to check. Last model release they only put it into preview[0] at first.

Does that mean this model is production ready?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47076484

Yeap it russian, but the whole russian sentence doesn't make any sense, just messed words with no meaning at all :)

Looks like they removed the option to "listen to article". I wonder why.

Thank you for this gem.

I ran it through speech-to-text and it starts with something among the lines of "dear colleagues, just like a doctor tells a patient 'health can wait'...", after that it's nonsense.

I don't know if what the doctor said is some kind of idiomatic expression, but appears to be the opposite of sound medical advice. :)

Yesterday, or the day before, Google lowered the AI Pro quota from 33x standard usage to 4x.

From the talk on the Gemini subreddit it's severely lower than before. I'm likely canceling my AI Pro.

The update also broke the app for me. Editing a message crashes the app every time. I'm on a Pixel lol

The way they're charging for failed generations is brutal.

Checked my 5 hour quota, it was 0%, got this for multiple attempts:

I'm getting more image requests than usual, so I can't create that for you right now. Please try again later.

or

Can you ask me again later? I'm being asked to create more images than usual, so I can't do that for you right now.

Went back and found they took 34% of my quota for the privilege of repeating that same error.

I think the "Usage Limits" screen is new so who knows how long they've been counting errors against our quota. I guess I should be grateful it's now visible.

I'm seeing this too.

API price for gemini-3.5-flash is 3x gemini-3-flash-preview so they might be throttling it 3x sooner. They should either drop API prices or not advertise AI Pro as supporting Antigravity.

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing#gemini-3.5-fla...

The web version went from 100 Pro Prompts per day to...12 per 5 hours lol. I just did 3 back and forth not even technical planning for an infra project and I am ~25% thorough. Insane.

At least in some cases, there seems to be a move toward training on more synthetic data and strictly curated data, especially for smaller models where knowledge can't be extremely broad, because there just isn't enough room to store the world in tens or hundreds of gigabytes of model weights. So, to achieve higher quality reasoning, the training has to be focused and the data has to be very high quality and high density.

With strong tool use, it maybe doesn't even matter that the models are using older data. They can search for updated information. Though most models currently don't, without a little nudge in that direction.

Also, I believe the Qwen 3 series are all based on the same base model, with just fine-tuning/post-training to improve them on various metrics. Maybe everything in the Gemini 3 series is the same, and maybe they're concurrently training the Gemini 4 base model with updated knowledge as we speak.

Can you explain what you mean?

you really shouldn't have them pulling facts from their weights, they need grounding from real data sources

I thought that was a choice that Google made?

I think flash just means "fast" now

Real smart. I’ve come to associate ”Flash” with ”useless make-shit-up”, and always look for Thinking/Pro when I see it set. Now, suddenly, there is only Flash?

My guess is Gemini Pro coming later will be 2x more, bringing it comparable to Opus’s pricing.

That would be Flash Lite now, and I'm also interested in the cheaper end of things so kinda disappointed they didn't release 3.5 Flash Lite at the same time...

Why would the Chinese sell me nvidia cards? I can just by an AMD iGPU, and the perf/$ is much better than nvidia dGPUs.

(Typed on a 2023 macbook perfectly capable of running the Chinese open weight models.)

I've had the $20 Gemini plan to use when my local setup runs into tougher problems and the throttling today has been bonkers. I canceled my subscription and will look into upgrading my local setup.

Aren't China also allowed to purchase Nvidia GPUs now too?

Doesn't need to be the Chinese. It can be anyone without stratospheric Nvidia margins. The Gold Rush phase of AI economy (aka "the bubble") is beginning to slow down and the Optimization phase is just beginning to ramp up (we see this with massive bumps to token cost and token burn rate of pretty much all frontier models, plus the general pivot away from your typical individual chat end-users to businesses and employees of said businesses) and there will come a time when "nvidia has the best software stack" will not mean much for the big players. Organically, I think it already kinda does, it's just masked with the inertia of massive circular deals and Nvidia selling its services to itself (entities it backs/invests in).

Arena.ai is saying "Gemini 3.5 Flash’s pricing shifts the Pareto frontier in Text. 8 models from GoogleDeepMind dominate the Text Arena Pareto curve where only 4 labs are represented for top performance in their price tiers."

https://x.com/arena/status/2056793180998361233

Yeah, bummer. I was very excited for this release, but this killed it.

The pricing is an issue.

I have and use both Claude Code and Gemini CLI, and still don't consider Gemini worth starting for coding except to review Claude's output in critical commits (on a security boundary, maybe broad refactors, etc.), though I try side-by-side every now and then just to see the state of things. I also use Gemini Pro in a security scanning harness to act as a second set of eyes, but Opus is better at finding security bugs than Gemini, so I don't know that it's accomplishing anything beyond just using Opus.

Gemini Pro 3.1 for agentic coding is still clumsy. It chews a lot, has a harder time with tools and interacting with the codebase. I haven't tried any 3.5 version, yet, though. The benchmarks look promising.

I'll note I like the Google models' prose better than any others at the moment, though. Even the small open models (Gemma 4 family) have excellent prose, relatively speaking, that doesn't stink of the LLMisms that I find so annoying about OpenAI (especially) and Anthropic models. So, I'll probably start using Gemini for writing API docs, even if all code is Claude.

Gemini models have consistently disregarded rules and gone their own way for me. They will finish a task and get it done frequently way above the scope that you gave it, but they take a million shortcuts to get there. e.g. deciding the linter isn't important and disabling the pre commit hook. coding features you didn't ask for.

My anecdote: smart but too stubborn to be useful.

I have been trying Gemini since 2.5 for coding.

It is the smartest for creative web stuff like HTML/CSS/JS.

But it has been very stubborn with following instructions like AGENTS.md.

And architecturally for large projects I tested, the code isn't on par with Opus 4.5+ and GPT 5.3+.

I would rather use DeepSeek 4 Flash on High (not max) than Gemini even if they had the same cost.

I currently use GPT 5.5 + DeepSeek 4 Flash.

BUT I didn't test Gemini 3.5 Flash yet. And it seems, from another comment in this post, that the Antigravity quota for is bricked for Google Pro plans which is the plan I have. So I don't have high hopes.

I switched from Opus 4.6 -> Opus 4.7 -> GPT 5.5 and tried Flash 3.5 tonight and I was not impressed. It is straight up unreliable, e.g. deleting code and forgetting to add the new stuff it was asked to, then happily marking the task as complete with up-beat conclusion. I personally appreciate GPT 5.5 toned-down, objective style so really dislike how this model feels. I get that it's a flash model and not in the same league as GPT 5.5 but their marketing suggest otherwise so thy are just setting themselves up for disappointment.

Opus is not the correct tier to compare this flash model with.

On my tasks it has not been as good as even Sonnet 4.6 so far.

Instruction following over long context feels worse.

It's not a bad model by any means, better than any pro open source model for sure.

I was using GPT 5.5 for a bunch of work this morning. It's brilliant and efficient. I was also using GPT 5.4 mini. It gets the job done and works great for subtasks that 5.5 designs. Gemini 3.5 Flash is SUCH a Gemini. It seems to work okay, but its attitude is disgusting.

"Yes, your idea is excellent."

"How this works beautifully:"

"This is a fantastic development!"

"This is an exceptionally clean and robust architecture."

and then I point out what feels like an obvious flaw:

"You have pointed out an extremely critical and subtle issue. You are absolutely 100% correct."

I'm sad that I'll probably stop using 3.5 Flash because I just hate its personality.

I think the number of people still holding a grudge for that today is small.

Early Claude was a weak simulation of Goody2.ai. Things change. Being a lover or hater of a model doesn’t make sense. It’s just tech. Run evals. Then use.

Nano Banana is one of the most used image gen models

From looking at all of them, it actually seems to be the best one, followed by Deepseek 3.1. And something went wrong with GPT-5's.

Fascinating, kimi k2 has good clock too from my limited time being on the site.

Ubiquitous like the crack epidemic.

or 3/4 the price (of 3.1 Pro) if we believe their benchmarks

The pelican is ready to discuss increased synergies of bringing AI to all teams at the firm!

That made me subtly, yet audibly, laugh.

Given how widely varying the amount of tokens each model uses for a given task, "price-per-token" is essentially meaningless when doing this sort of comparison.

Artificial Analysis's "Cost to run" model (aka num_tokens_used * price_per_token) is much better, but even that is likely problematic since it's not clear whether running a bunch of benchmarks maps cleanly to real-world token use.

That graph seems odd. It looks like Gemini 3.5 Flash is not actually on the convex hull, and they forced the 'frontier' to bend inwards to include it

Lol, nice project! I liked the xkcd-style comic the most!

I'm only gonna cry a little bit about the all-too-accurate roasts. Some of that stuff cut deep!

The xkcd comic is a really cool idea. I enjoyed seeing my wrapped, thanks!

It's been renamed to "antigravity IDE." Updating my old IDE got me the new non-IDE app though, which is strange.

They still have an Antigravity IDE version.

I see no 'score' or 'age' mentioned in your script. What does age signify and how are they calculated?

Buddy, this tone may be why.

We genuinely don't understand what your post is about. What is this tool? What are these numbers representative? Why are things sorted in that order?

You haven't communicated really anything at all. I am interested, I'd like to understand. Write a more complete post, please.

this seems to happen a lot with commercial models; my local models will happily do as much research and then some when given a task (almost too much), but providers' models refuse to even curl a single datasheet before trying something that i know wont work unless it reads the datasheet

fucking get that with claude all the time too.

I'm seeing this too.

I have a SQL agent and my tests with 3.5 are resulting in hitting query budget limits that have never been hit before. On average, to answer the same question, 3.5 is spending 10x more on SQL queries vs gemini-3-flash-preview.

The query patterns can be extremely degenerate too. E.g. the agent will hit the semantic layer tool to pull the schema, then run `SELECT * FROM table LIMIT 1`, which hits the query budget limit and fails.

I've only really been looking this morning, so I need to do a full eval, but the initial results match what your benchmark shows.

---

Side note: your benchmark has an issue. On Q1 medium the model returned gross margin of 0.127 instead of 12.7 (%), and the benchmark failed it. The failures on Q9 and Q21 are the same (I didn't check other questions). Nowhere in the prompt did you specify you wanted the values converted to percentage points and rounded.

If you asked me to write that SQL with that prompt, unless you were throwing it directly into a visualization I would format it the same way gemini-flash did. If I were pulling into a spreadsheet or vis tool this format is preferable because it's easier to format in a client application.

The other failures like Q21 incorrectly averaging the list price are correct failures.

What exactly are you doing with this that you can’t generate $1.50 of value per million tokens?

Same. Feels very goal oriented. Requires multiple attempts to deter course and means to achieve it.

On tool use. Gave it interactive design assignment on Antigravity 2. Failed miserably until I asked to use playwright for testing. And boy did it go with it. Tested hell out of visuals, nailed the solution.

On following instruction. Asked Gemini Flash 3.5 to summarize YouTube video (google io developer keynote), a task that would previously be trivial (use ot often), but it kept hallucinating points and referencing io dev keynote blog posts from several years ago. Multiple attempts, same result even on repeat requests. Almost insistent on validity of information provided, ignoring questions if it had such capability.

There is now an Antigravity CLI which will replace Gemini CLI. Gemini CLI is going to be EOLd by June 18th afaik. Antigravity CLI and GUI share the same agent harness, so it might do the same task.

Source: https://developers.googleblog.com/an-important-update-transi...

On a per-token, it's cheaper than Opus, GPT, and Gemini Pro; and while I hear the "it uses more tokens so its more expensive", this discounts a few things (1) improvements over time (2) finding the right way to prompt it (3) finding proper places to use this model.

Are you on a paid plan?

That really depends on whether they have similar parameter counts, doesn't it? Unless you know that, the comparison is just strange

Out of curiosity, what was your workflow to generate this comment? I’m curious what model (claude?) and process (manual prompt with bullet points?) you used.

Yeah, Google chose a misleading title for the blog post.

> concerned about Gemini models being benchmaxxed generally

I would say they are the least benchmaxxed out of all the top labs, for coding. They've always been behind opus/gpt-xhigh for agentic stuff (mostly because of poor tool use), but in raw coding tasks and ability to take a paper/blog/idea and implement it, they've been punching above their benchmarks ever since 2.5. I would still take 2.5 over all the "chinese model beats opus" if I could run that locally, tbh.

Sounds like a hallucination in Russian

> correlated to the tokens that you have access too (and everyone else does)

Do you mean "the weight parameters you have access to[sic]" or do you frequently find yourself limited by the model's token vocabulary?

I wonder if this is because it's a larger model or maybe just because they can? Although with the latest Deepseek it's really tough to compete pricing wise. Inference speed and integration (e.g. Antigravity) might be their only hope here

I spent 10 minutes with it in their new "agy" CLI tool and immediately found it is nowhere close to GPT 5.5 high in codex. It was sloppy and made poor assumptions in its analysis. It would have produced a mess if I let it go ahead with its plan. And it was just like previous versions of Gemini with poor tool use (e.g. "I wrote a file with the plan..." but file was never written.)

For reference, this is a Rust codebase, deep "systems" stuff (database, compiler, virtual machine / language runtime)

They're still months behind OpenAI and Anthropic on coding.

Mind you I also find Claude Code careless and unreliable these days, too. (But it's good at tool use at least).

I do use Gemini for "lifestyle" AI usage (web research etc) tho.

What we need today is a standard local API (think of it as a POSIX extension). So that each desktop app that needs AI to enhance a feature can simply call that. This way, those apps will need to handle the case where AI is not availabile. This will empower users.

Nah, it costs what you are willing to pay.

edited it.

Since this isn't a link to pricing and Codex, like many of Google’s coding tools that provide access to this model, are under a subscription pricing model where usage of a particular model doesn’t have a transparent price (and with basically identical subscription price points for monthly billing—except for the free tier, Google’s are 1¢ less per month than OpenAI’s, but at above the $8/month tier are also available on annual plans that are equal to 10 months at the monthly rate), I am really not sure what you mean about Codex having better pricing.

Where do you see that it’s low capability?

And Google is trying to make something affordable enough for a mass market, ad-supported audience.

They aren’t hyper focused on enterprise like Anthropic is. And that’s okay. There’s room for different players in different markets.