18 ms·

Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

• FergusArgyll 10mo ago
  So much for "Monopolies get lazy, they just rent seek and don't innovate"
  • concinds 10mo ago
    The LLM market has no moats so no one "feels" like a monopoly, rightfully.
  • NitpickLawyer 10mo ago
    Also so much for the "wall, stagnation, no more data" folks. Womp womp.
  • deskamess 10mo ago
    Monopolies and wanna-be monopolies on the AI-train are running for their lives. They have to innovate to be the last one standing (or second last) - in their mind.
  • incrudible 10mo ago
    LLMs are a big threat to their search engine revenue, so whatever monopoly Google may have had does not exist anymore.
  • jonathan_h 10mo ago
    "Monopolies get lazy, they just rent seek and don't innovate" I think part of what enables a monopoly is absence of meaningful competition, regardless of how that's achieved -- significant moat, by law or regulation, etc. I don't know to what extent Google has been rent-seeking and not innovating, but Google doesn't have the luxury to rent-seek any longer.
• pancodecake 10mo ago
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• meetpateltech 10mo ago
  Deepmind Page: https://deepmind.google/models/gemini/flash/ https://deepmind.google/models/gemini/flash/ Developer Blog: https://blog.google/technology/developers/build-with-gemini-3-flash/ https://blog.google/technology/developers/build-with-gemini-... Model Card [pdf]: https://deepmind.google/models/model-cards/gemini-3-flash/ https://deepmind.google/models/model-cards/gemini-3-flash/ Gemini 3 Flash in Search AI mode: https://blog.google/products/search/google-ai-mode-update-gemini-3-flash/ https://blog.google/products/search/google-ai-mode-update-ge...
  • minimaxir 10mo ago
    Documentation for Gemini 3 Flash in particular: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/gemini-3 https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/gemini-3
  • simonw 10mo ago
    For anyone from the Gemini team reading this: these links should all be prominent in the announcement posts. I always have to hunt around for them!
    • meetpateltech 10mo ago
      Google actually does something similar for major releases - they publish a dedicated collection page with all related links. For example, the Gemini 3 Pro collection: https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-3-collection/ https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-3-collection/ But having everything linked at the bottom of the announcement post itself would be really great too!
      • simonw 10mo ago
        Sadly there's nothing about Gemini 3 Flash on that page yet.
• GaggiX 10mo ago
  They went too far, now the Flash model is competing with their Pro version. Better SWE-bench, better ARC-AGI 2 than 3.0 Pro. I imagine they are going to improve 3.0 Pro before it's no more in Preview. Also I don't see it written in the blog post but Flash supports more granular settings for reasoning: minimal, low, medium, high (like openai models), while pro is only low and high.
  • skerit 10mo ago
    > They went too far, now the Flash model is competing with their Pro version Wasn't this the case with the 2.5 Flash models too? I remember being very confused at that time.
    • JohnnyMarcone 10mo ago
      This is similar to how Anthropic has treated sonnet/opus as well. At least pre opus 4.5. To me it seems like the big model has been "look what we can do", and the smaller model is "actually use this one though".
  • jug 10mo ago
    I'm not sure how I'm going to live with this!
  • minimaxir 10mo ago
    "minimal" is a bit weird. > Matches the “no thinking” setting for most queries. The model may think very minimally for complex coding tasks. Minimizes latency for chat or high throughput applications. I'd prefer a hard "no thinking" rule than what this is.
    • GaggiX 10mo ago
      It still supports the legacy mode of setting the budget, you can set it to 0 and it would be equivalent to none reasoning effort like gpt 5.1/5.2
      • 10mo ago
• samyok 10mo ago
  Don’t let the “flash” name fool you, this is an amazing model. I have been playing with it for the past few weeks, it’s genuinely my new favorite; it’s so fast and it has such a vast world knowledge that it’s more performant than Claude Opus 4.5 or GPT 5.2 extra high, for a fraction (basically order of magnitude less!!) of the inference time and price
  • esafak 10mo ago
    What are you using it for and what were you using before?
  • jauntywundrkind 10mo ago
    Just to point this out: many of these frontier models cost isn't that far away from two orders of magnitude more than what DeepSeek charges. It doesn't compare the same, no, but with coaxing I find it to be a pretty capable competent coding model & capable of answering a lot of general queries pretty satisfactorily (but if it's a short session, why economize?). $0.28/m in, $0.42/m out. Opus 4.5 is $5/$25 (17x/60x). I've been playing around with other models recently (Kimi, GPT Codex, Qwen, others) to try to better appreciate the difference. I knew there was a big price difference, but watching myself feeding dollars into the machine rather than nickles has also founded in me quite the reverse appreciation too. I only assume "if you're not getting charged, you are the product" has to be somewhat in play here. But when working on open source code, I don't mind.
    • happyopossum 10mo ago
      Two orders of magnitude would imply that these models cost $28/m in and $42/m out. Nothing is even close to that.
      • jauntywundrkind 10mo ago
        To me as an engineer, 60x for output (which is most of the cost I see, AFAICT) is not that significantly different from 100x. I tried to be quite clear with showing my work here. I agree that 17x is much closer to a single order of magnitude than two. But 60x is, to me, a bulk enough of the way to 100x that yeah I don't feel bad saying it's nearly two orders (it's 1.78 orders of magnitude). To me, your complaint feels rigid & ungenerous. My post is showing to me as -1, but I standby it right now. Arguing over the technicalities here (is 1.78 close enough to 2 orders to count) feels besides the point to me: DeepSeek is vastly more affordable than nearly everything else, putting even Gemini 3 Flash here to shame. And I don't think people are aware of that. I guess for my own reference, since I didn't do it the first time: at $0.50/$3.00 / M-i/o, Gemini 3 Flash here is 1.8x & 7.1x (1e1.86) more expensive than DeepSeek.
• tanh 10mo ago
  Does this imply we don't need as much compute for models/agents? How can any other AI model compete against that?
• doomerhunter 10mo ago
  Pretty stoked for this model. Building a lot with "mixture of agents" / mix of models and Gemini's smaller models do feel really versatile in my opinion. Hoping that the local ones keep progressively up (gemma-line)
• fariszr 10mo ago
  These flash models keep getting more expensive with every release. Is there an OSS model that's better than 2.0 flash with similar pricing, speed and a 1m context window? Edit: this is not the typical flash model, it's actually an insane value if the benchmarks match real world usage. > Gemini 3 Flash achieves a score of 78%, outperforming not only the 2.5 series, but also Gemini 3 Pro. It strikes an ideal balance for agentic coding, production-ready systems and responsive interactive applications. The replacement for old flash models will be probably the 3.0 flash lite then.
  • fullstackwife 10mo ago
    cost of e2e task resolution should be cheaper, even if single inference cost is higher, you need fewer loops to solve a problem now
    • fariszr 10mo ago
      Sure, but for simple tasks that require a large context window, aka the typical usecase for 2.0 flash, it's still significantly more expensive.
  • aoeusnth1 10mo ago
    I think it's good, they're raising the size (and price) of flash a bit and trying to position Flash as an actually useful coding / reasoning model. There's always lite for people who want dirt cheap prices and don't care about quality at all.
  • thecupisblue 10mo ago
    Yes, but the 3.0 Flash is cheaper, faster and better than 2.5 Pro. So if 2.5 Pro was good for your usecase, you just got a better model for about 1/3rd of the price, but might hurt the wallet a bit more if you use 2.5 Flash currently and want an upgrade - which is fair tbh.
    • mark_l_watson 10mo ago
      I agree, adding one point: a better model can in effect use fewer tokens if you get a higher percentage of successful one-shots to work. I am a ‘retired gentleman scientist’ so take this with a grain of salt (I do a lot of non-commercial, non-production experiments): when I watch the output for tool use, better models have fewer tool ‘re-tries.’
• user_7832 10mo ago
  Two quick questions to Gemini/AI Studio users: 1, has anyone actually found 3 Pro better than 2.5 (on non code tasks)? I struggle to find a difference beyond the quicker reasoning time and fewer tokens. 2, has anyone found any non-thinking models better than 2.5 or 3 Pro? So far I find the thinking ones significantly ahead of non thinking models (of any company for that matter.)
  • Workaccount2 10mo ago
    Gemini 3 is a step change up against 2.5 for electrical engineering R&D.
  • tmaly 10mo ago
    Not for coding but for the design aspect, 3 outshines 2.5
  • Davidzheng 10mo ago
    I think it's probably actually better at math. Though still not enough to be useful in my research in a substantial way. Though I suspect this will change suddenly at some point as the models move past a certain threshold (also it is heavily limited by the fact that the models are very bad at not giving wrong proofs/counterexamples) so that even if the models are giving useful rates of successes, the labor to sort through a bunch of trash makes it hard to justify.
• jug 10mo ago
  Looks like a good workhorse model, like I felt 2.5 Flash also was at its time of launch. I hope I can build confidence with it because it'll be good to offload Pro costs/limits as well of course always nice with speed for more basic coding or queries. I'm impressed and curious about the recent extreme gains on ARC-AGI-2 from 3 Pro, GPT-5.1 and now even 3 Flash.
• simonsarris 10mo ago
  Even before this release the tools (for me: Claude Code and Gemini for other stuff) reached a "good enough" plateau that means any other company is going to have a hard time making me (I think soon most users) want to switch. Unless a new release from a different company has a real paradigm shift, they're simply sufficient. This was not true in 2023/2024 IMO. With this release the "good enough" and "cheap enough" intersect so hard that I wonder if this is an existential threat to those other companies.
  • theLiminator 10mo ago
    For me, the last wave of models finally started delivering on their agentic coding promises.
    • inquirerGeneral 10mo ago
      [dead]
    • orourke 10mo ago
      This has been my experience exactly. Even over just the last few weeks I’ve noticed a dramatic drop in having to undo what the agents have done.
  • nprateem 10mo ago
    But for me the previous models were routinely wrong time wasters that overall added no speed increase taking the lottery of whether they'd be correct into account.
  • bgirard 10mo ago
    Why wouldn't you switch? The cost to switch is near zero for me. Some tools have built in model selectors. Direct CLI/IDE plug-ins practically the same UI.
    • azuanrb 10mo ago
      Not OP, but I feel the same way. Cost is just one of the factor. I'm used to Claude Code UX, my CLAUDE.md works well with my workflow too. Unless there's any significant improvement, changing to new models every few months is going to hurt me more.
• Workaccount2 10mo ago
  Really hoping this is used for real time chatting and video. The current model is decent, but when doing technical stuff (help me figure out how to assemble this furniture) it falls far short of 3 pro.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• Tiberium 10mo ago
  Yet again Flash receives a notable price hike: from $0.3/$2.5 for 2.5 Flash to $0.5/$3 (+66.7% input, +20% output) for 3 Flash. Also, as a reminder, 2 Flash used to be $0.1/$0.4.
  • BeetleB 10mo ago
    Yes, but this Flash is a lot more powerful - beating Gemini 3 Pro on some benchmarks (and pretty close on others). I don't view this as a "new Flash" but as "a much cheaper Gemini 3 Pro/GPT-5.2"
    • Tiberium 10mo ago
      I would be less salty if they gave us 3 Flash Lite at same price as 2.5 Flash or cheaper with better capability, but they still focus on the pricier models :(
      • zzleeper 10mo ago
        Same! I want to do some data stuff from documents and 2.0 pricing was amazing, but the constant increases go the wrong way for this task :/
      • int_19h 10mo ago
        We'll probably get 3 Flash Lite eventually, it just takes time to distill the models, and you want to start with the one that is likely to bring in more money.
    • jexe 10mo ago
      Right, depends on your use cases. I was looking forward to the model as an upgrade to 2.5 Flash, but when you're processing hundreds of millions of tokens a day (not hard to do if you're dealing in documents or emails with a few users), the economics fall apart.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• bennydog224 10mo ago
  From the article, speed & cost match 2.5 Flash. I'm working on a project where there's a huge gap between 2.5 Flash and 2.5 Flash Lite as far as performance and cost goes. -> 2.5 Flash Lite is super fast & cheap (~1-1.5s inference), but poor quality responses. -> 2.5 Flash gives high quality responses, but fairly expensive & slow (5-7s inference) I really just need an in-between for Flash and Flash Lite for cost and performance. Right now, users have to wait up to 7s for a quality response.
• _lvbh 10mo ago
  Thinking along the line of speed, I wonder if a model that can reason and use tools at 60fps would be able to control a robot with raw instructions and perform skilled physical work currently limited by the text-only output of LLMs. Also helps that the Gemini series is really good at multimodal processing with images and audio. Maybe they can also encode sensory inputs in a similar way. Pipe dream right now, but 50 years later? Maybe
  • iamgopal 10mo ago
    Much sooner, hardware, power, software, even AI model design, inference hardware, cache, everything being improved , it's exponential.
  • incognito124 10mo ago
    Believe it or not, there's Gemini Robotics, which seems to be exactly what you're talking about: https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-robotics/ https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-robotics/ Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43344082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43344082
• bearjaws 10mo ago
  I've been using the preview flash model exclusively since it came out, the speed and quality of response is all I need at the moment. Although still using Claude Code w/ Opus 4.5 for dev work. Google keeps their models very "fresh" and I tend to get more correct answers when asking about Azure or O365 issues, ironically copilot will talk about now deleted or deprecated features more often.
  • sv123 10mo ago
    I've found copilot within the Azure portal to be basically useless for solving most problems.
    • djeastm 10mo ago
      Me too. I don't understand why companies think we devs need a custom chat on their website when we all have access to a chat with much smarter models open in a different tab.
      • golem14 10mo ago
        That's not what they are thinking. They are thinking: "We want to capture the dev and make them use our model – since it is easier to use it in our tab, it can afford to be inferior. This way we get lots of tasty, tasty user data."
• moralestapia 10mo ago
  Not only it is fast, it is also quite cheap, nice!
• __jl__ 10mo ago
  This is awesome. No preview release either, which is great to production. They are pushing the prices higher with each release though: API pricing is up to $0.5/M for input and $3/M for output For comparison: Gemini 3.0 Flash: $0.50/M for input and $3.00/M for output Gemini 2.5 Flash: $0.30/M for input and $2.50/M for output Gemini 2.0 Flash: $0.15/M for input and $0.60/M for output Gemini 1.5 Flash: $0.075/M for input and $0.30/M for output (after price drop) Gemini 3.0 Pro: $2.00/M for input and $12/M for output Gemini 2.5 Pro: $1.25/M for input and $10/M for output Gemini 1.5 Pro: $1.25/M for input and $5/M for output I think image input pricing went up even more. Correction: It is a preview model...
  • srameshc 10mo ago
    Thanks that was a great breakup of cost. I just assumed before that it was the same pricing. The pricing probably comes from the confidence and the buzz around Gemini 3.0 as one of the best performing models. But competetion is hot in the area and it's not too far where we get similar performing models for cheaper price.
  • mips_avatar 10mo ago
    I'm more curious how Gemini 3 flash lite performs/is priced when it comes out. Because it may be that for most non coding tasks the distinction isn't between pro and flash but between flash and flash lite.
  • uluyol 10mo ago
    Are these the current prices or the prices at the time the models were released?
    • __jl__ 10mo ago
      Mostly at the time of release except for 1.5 Flash which got a price drop in Aug 2024. Google has been discontinuing older models after several months of transition period so I would expect the same for the 2.5 models. But that process only starts when the release version of 3 models is out (pro and flash are in preview right now).
  • 10mo ago
• hubraumhugo 10mo ago
  You can get your HN profile analyzed and roasted by it. It's pretty funny :) https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com
  • echelon 10mo ago
    This is hilarious. The personalized pie charts and XKCD-style comics are great, and the roast-style humor is perfect. I do feel like it's not an entirely accurate caricature (recency bias? limited context?), but it's close enough. Good work! You should do a "show HN" if you're not worried about it costing you too much.
  • WhereIsTheTruth 10mo ago
    This is exactly why you keep your personal life off the internet
  • peheje 10mo ago
    This is great. I literally "LOL'd".
  • onraglanroad 10mo ago
    I didn't feel roasted at all. In fact I feel vindicated! https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/onraglanroad https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/onraglanroad
  • apparent 10mo ago
    Pretty fucking hilarious, if completely off-topic.
  • SubiculumCode 10mo ago
    dang https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/dang https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/dang
  • knicholes 10mo ago
    That cut deep
• poplarsol 10mo ago
  Will be interesting to see what their quota is. Gemini 3.0 Pro only gives you 250 / day until you spam them with enough BS requests to increase your total spend > $250.
• andrepd 10mo ago
  Is there a way to try this without a Google account?
  • mschulkind 10mo ago
    Just use openrouter or a similar aggregator.
• primaprashant 10mo ago
  Pricing is $0.5 / $3 per million input / output tokens. 2.5 Flash was $0.3 / $2.5. That's 66% increase in input tokens and 20% increase in output token pricing. For comparison, from 2.5 Pro ($1.25 / $10) to 3 Pro ($2 / $12), there was 60% increase in input tokens and 20% increase in output tokens pricing.
  • simonw 10mo ago
    Calculating price increases is made more complex by the difference in token usage. From https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-3-flash/ https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-3-flash/ : > Gemini 3 Flash is able to modulate how much it thinks. It may think longer for more complex use cases, but it also uses 30% fewer tokens on average than 2.5 Pro.
    • Tiberium 10mo ago
      Yes, but also most of the increase in 3 Flash is in the input context price, which isn't affected by reasoning.
      • int_19h 10mo ago
        It is affected if it has to round-trip, e.g. because it's making tool calls.
  • prvc 10mo ago
    Apples to oranges.
• _f9cu 10mo ago
  this is why samsung is stopping production in flash
  • Tepix 10mo ago
    This is why they stopped The Flash after season 9 in 2023.
• SyrupThinker 10mo ago
  I wonder if this suffers from the same issue as 3 Pro, that it frequently "thinks" for a long time about date incongruity, insisting that it is 2024, and that information it receives must be incorrect or hypothetical. Just avoiding/fixing that would probably speed up a good chunk of my own queries.
  • robrenaud 10mo ago
    Omg, it was so frustrating to say: Summarize recent working arxiv url And then it tells me the date is from the future and it simply refuses to fetch the URL.
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• Fiveplus 10mo ago
  It is interesting to see the "DeepMind" branding completely vanish from the post. This feels like the final consolidation of the Google Brain merger. The technical report mentions a new "MoE-lite" architecture. Does anyone have details on the parameter count? If this is under 20B params active, the distillation techniques they are using are lightyears ahead of everyone else.
• JeremyHerrman 10mo ago
  Disappointed to see continued increased pricing for 3 Flash (up from $0.30/$2.50 to $0.50/$3.00 for 1M input/output tokens). I'm more excited to see 3 Flash Lite. Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite needs a lot more steering than regular 2.5 Flash, but it is a very capable model and combined with the 50% batch mode discount it is CHEAP ($0.05/$0.20).
  • jeppebemad 10mo ago
    Have you seen any indications that there will be a Lite version?
    • summerlight 10mo ago
      I guess if they want to eventually deprecate the 2.5 family they will need to provide a substitute. And there are huge demands for cheap models.
• xnx 10mo ago
  OpenAI is pretty firmly in the rear-view mirror now.
  • walthamstow 10mo ago
    Google Antigravity is a buggy mess at the moment, but I believe it will eventually eat Cursor as well. The £20/mo tier currentluy has the highest usage limits on the market, including Google models and Sonnet and Opus 4.5.
    • tempaccount420 10mo ago
      It's not in Google's style, but they need a codex-like fine-tune. I don't think they have ever released fine-tunes like that though. The model is very hard to work with as is.
• rohitpaulk 10mo ago
  Wild how this beats 2.5 Pro in every single benchmark. Don't think this was true for Haiku 4.5 vs Sonnet 3.5.
  • FergusArgyll 10mo ago
    Sonnet 3.5 might have been better than opus 3. That's my recollection anyhow
• walthamstow 10mo ago
  I'm sure it's good, I thought the last one was too, but it seems like the backdoor way to increase prices is to release a new model
  • jeffbee 10mo ago
    If the model is better in that it resolves the task with fewer iterations then the i/o token pricing may be a wash or lower.
• kingstnap 10mo ago
  It has a SimpleQA score of 69%, a benchmark that tests knowledge on extremely niche facts, that's actually ridiculously high (Gemini 2.5 *Pro* had 55%) and reflects either training on the test set or some sort of cracked way to pack a ton of parametric knowledge into a Flash Model. I'm speculating but Google might have figured out some training magic trick to balance out the information storage in model capacity. That or this flash model has huge number of parameters or something.
  • GaggiX 10mo ago
    >or some sort of cracked way to pack a ton of parametric knowledge into a Flash Model. More experts with a lower pertentage of active ones -> more sparsity.
  • tanh 10mo ago
    This will be fantastic for voice. I presume Apple will use it
  • leumon 10mo ago
    Or could it be that it's using tool calls in reasoning (e.g. a google search)?
  • scrollop 10mo ago
    Also https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience Prepare to be amazed
    • albumen 10mo ago
      I’m amazed by how much Gemini 3 flash hallucinates; it performs poorly in that metric (along with lots of other models). In the Hallucination Rate vs. AA-Omniscience Index chart, it’s not in the most desirable quadrant; GPT-5.1 (high), opus 4.5 and 4.5 haiku are. Can someone explain how Gemini 3 pro/flash then do so well then in the overall Omniscience: Knowledge and Hallucination Benchmark?
      • 10mo ago
• inquirerGeneral 10mo ago
  [dead]
• whinvik 10mo ago
  Ok, I was a bit addicted to Opus 4.5 and was starting to feel like there's nothing like it. Turns out Gemini 3 Flash is pretty close. The Gemini CLI is not as good but the model more than makes up for it. The weird part is Gemini 3 Pro is nowhere as good an experience. Maybe because its just so slow.
  • __jl__ 10mo ago
    I will have to try that. Cursor bill got pretty high with Opus 4.5. Never considered opus before the 4.5 price drop but now it's hard to change... :)
    • diamondfist25 10mo ago
      $100 Claude max is the best subscription I’ve ever had. Well worth every penny now
      • vanviegen 10mo ago
        Or a $40 GitHub copilot plan also gets you a lot of Opus usage.
        • onoesworkacct 10mo ago
          Missing a lot without claude code tho
          • vanviegen 10mo ago
            I've tried both, and I'm still not sure. Claude Code steers more towards a hands-off, vibe coding approach, which I often regret later. With Copilot I'm more involved, which feels less 'magical' and takes me more time, but generally does not end in misery.
  • scrollop 10mo ago
    Yes! Gemini 3 pro is significantly slower than opus (surprisingly) , and prefer opus' output. Might be using flash for my MCP research/transcriber/minor tasks modl over haiku, now, though (will test of course)
• jtrn 10mo ago
  This is the first flash/mini model that doesn't make a complete ass of itself when I prompt for the following: "Tell me as much as possible about Skatval in Norway. Not general information. Only what is uniquely true for Skatval." Skatval is a small local area I live in, so I know when it's bullshitting. Usually, I get a long-winded answer that is PURE Barnum-statement, like "Skatval is a rural area known for its beautiful fields and mountains" and bla bla bla. Even with minimal thinking (it seems to do none), it gives an extremely good answer. I am really happy about this. I also noticed it had VERY good scores on tool-use, terminal, and agentic stuff. If that is TRUE, it might be awesome for coding. I'm tentatively optimistic about this.
  • amunozo 10mo ago
    I tried the same with my father's little village (Zarza Capilla, in Spain), and it gave a surprisingly good answer in a couple of seconds. Amazing.
  • kingstnap 10mo ago
    You are effectively describing SimpleQA but with a single question instead of a comprehensive benchmark and you can note the dramatic increase in performance there.
  • peterldowns 10mo ago
    That's a really cool prompt idea, I just tried it with my neighborhood and it nailed it. Very impressive.
  • jtrn 10mo ago
    I tested it for coding in Cursor, and the disappointment is real. It's completely INSANE when it comes to just doing anything agentic. I asked it to give me an option for how to best solve a problem, and within 1 second it was NPM installing into my local environment without ANY thinking. It's like working with a manic patient. It's like it thinks: I just HAVE TO DO SOMETHING, ANYTHING! RIGHT NOW! DO IT DO IT! I HEARD TEST!?!?!? LET'S INSTALL PLAYWRIGHT RIGHT NOW LET'S GOOOOOO. This might be fun for vibecode to just let it go crazy and don't stop until an MVP is working, but I'm actually afraid to turn on agent mode with this now. If it was just over-eager, that would be fine, but it's also not LISTENING to my instructions. Like the previous example, I didn't ask it to install a testing framework, I asked it for options fitting my project. And this happened many times. It feels like it treats user prompts/instructions as: "Suggestions for topics that you can work on."
• simonw 10mo ago
  Quick pricing comparison: https://www.llm-prices.com/#it=100000&ot=10000&sel=gemini-3-flash-preview%2Cgemini-3-pro-preview%2Cgemini-3-pro-preview-200k%2Cgpt-5.2%2Cclaude-opus-4-5%2Cclaude-sonnet-4.5%2Cclaude-4.5-haiku%2Cgpt-5-mini https://www.llm-prices.com/#it=100000&ot=10000&sel=gemini-3-... It's 1/4 the price of Gemini 3 Pro ≤200k and 1/8 the price of Gemini 3 Pro >200k - notable that the new Flash model doesn’t have a price increase after that 200,000 token point. It’s also twice the price of GPT-5 Mini for input, half the price of Claude 4.5 Haiku.
• zhyder 10mo ago
  Glad to see big improvement in the SimpleQA Verified benchmark (28->69%), which is meant to measure factuality (built-in, i.e. without adding grounding resources). That's one benchmark where all models seemed to have low scores until recently. Can't wait to see a model go over 90%... then will be years till the competition is over number of 9s in such a factuality benchmark, but that'd be glorious.
  • jug 10mo ago
    Yes, that's very good because it's my main use case for Flash; queries depending on world knowledge. Not science or engineering problems, but think you'd ask someone that has a really broad knowledge about things and can give quick and straightforward answers.
• tootyskooty 10mo ago
  Since it now includes 4 thinking levels (minimal-high) I'd really appreciate if we got some benchmarks across the whole sweep (and not just what's presumably high). Flash is meant to be a model for lower cost, latency-sensitive tasks. Long thinking times will both make TTFT >> 10s (often unacceptable) and also won't really be that cheap?
  • happyopossum 10mo ago
    Google appears to be changing what flash is “meant for” with this release - the capability it has along with the thinking budgets make it superior to previous Pro models in both outcome and speed. The likely-soon-coming flash-lite will fit right in to where flash used to be - cheap and fast.
• caminanteblanco 10mo ago
  Does anyone else understand what the difference is between Gemini 3 'Thinking' and 'Pro'? Thinking "Solves complex problems" and Pro "Thinks longer for advanced math & code". I assume that these are just different reasoning levels for Gemini 3, but I can't even find mention of there being 2 versions anywhere, and the API doesn't even mention the Thinking-Pro dichotomy.
  • flakiness 10mo ago
    It seems: - "Thinking" is Gemini 3 Flash with higher "thinking_level" - Prop is Gemini 3 Pro. It doesn't mention "thinking_level" but I assume it is set to high-ish.
  • peheje 10mo ago
    I think: Fast = Gemini 3 Flash without thinking (or very low thinking budget) Thinking = Gemini 3 flash with high thinking budget Pro = Gemini 3 Pro with thinking
    • sunaookami 10mo ago
      It's this, yes: https://x.com/joshwoodward/status/2001350002975850520 https://x.com/joshwoodward/status/2001350002975850520 >Fast = 3 Flash >Thinking = 3 Flash (with thinking) >Pro = 3 Pro (with thinking)
      • caminanteblanco 10mo ago
        Thank you! I wish they had clearer labelling (or at the very least some documentation) explaining this.
  • lysace 10mo ago
    Really stupid question: How is Gemini-like 'thinking' separate from artificial general intelligence (AGI)? When I ask Gemini 3 Flash this question, the answer is vague but agency comes up a lot. Gemini thinking is always triggered by a query. This seems like a higher-level programming issue to me. Turn it into a loop. Keep the context. Those two things make it costly for sure. But does it make it an AGI? Surely Google has tried this?
• speedgoose 10mo ago
  I’m wondering why Claude Opus 4.5 is missing from the benchmarks table.
  • anonym29 10mo ago
    I wondered this, too. I think the emphasis here was on the faster / lower costs models, but that would suggest that Haiku 4.5 should be the Anthropic entry on the table instead. They also did not use the most powerful xAI model either, instead opting for the fast one. Regardless, this new Gemini 3 Flash model is good enough that Anthropic should be feeling pressure on both price and model output quality simultaneously regardless of which Anthropic model is being compared against, which is ultimately good for the consumer at the end of the day.
• anonym29 10mo ago
  I never have, do not, and conceivably never will use gemini models, or any other models that require me to perform inference on Alphabet/Google's servers (i.e. gemma models I can run locally or on other providers are fine), but kudos to the team over there for the work here, this does look really impressive. This kind of competition is good for everyone, even people like me who will probably never touch any gemini model.
  • oklahomasports 10mo ago
    You don’t want Google to know that you are searching for like advice on how much a 61 yr old can contribute to a 401k. What are you hiding?
    • anonym29 10mo ago
      Why do you close the bathroom stall door in public? You're not doing anything wrong. Everyone knows what you're doing. You have no secrets to hide. Yet you value your privacy anyway. Why? Also - I have no problem using Anthropic's cloud-hosted services. Being opposed to some cloud providers doesn't mean I'm opposed to all cloud providers.
      • happyopossum 10mo ago
        > I have no problem using Anthropic's cloud-hosted services Anthropic - one of GCP’s largest TPU customers? Good for you. https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanding-our-use-of-google-cloud-tpus-and-services https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanding-our-use-of-google-c...
• nickvec 10mo ago
  So is Gemini 3 Fast the same as Gemini 3 Flash?
  • evandena 10mo ago
    yes
• alach11 10mo ago
  I really wish these models were available via AWS or Azure. I understand strategically that this might not make sense for Google, but at a non-software-focused F500 company it would sure make it a lot easier to use Gemini.
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  • lbhdc 10mo ago
    I feel like that is part of their cloud strategy. If your company wants to pump a huge amount of data through one of these you will pay a premium in network costs. Their sales people will use that as a lever for why you should migrate some or all of your fleet to their cloud.
    • jiggawatts 10mo ago
      A few gigabytes of text is practically free to transfer even over the most exorbitant egress fee networks, but would cost “get finance approval” amounts of money to process even through a cheaper model.
      • lbhdc 10mo ago
        It sounds like you already know what sales peoples incentives are. They don't care about the tiny players who wanna use tiny slices. I was referring to people who are trying to push PB through these. GCPs policies make a lot of sense if they are trying to get major players to switch their compute/data host to reduce overall costs.
        • jiggawatts 10mo ago
          The cost ratio is the same.
          • lbhdc 10mo ago
            It isn't. You don't pay "msrp" at scale :)
• heliophobicdude 10mo ago
  Any word on if this using their diffusion architecture?
  • aoeusnth1 10mo ago
    tokens/s don't match, so unlikely
• k8sToGo 10mo ago
  I remember the preview price for 2.5 flash was much cheaper. And then it got quite expensive when it went out of preview. I hope the same won't happen.
  • Tiberium 10mo ago
    For 2.5 Flash Preview the price was specifically much cheaper for the no-reasoning mode, in this case the model reasons by default so I don't think they'll increase the price even further.
• jijji 10mo ago
  I tried Gemini CLI the other day, typed in two one line requests, then it responded that it would not go further because I ran out of tokens. I've hard other people complaint that it will re-write your entire codebase from scratch and you should make backups before even starting any code-based work with the Gemini CLI. I understand they are trying to compete against Claude Code, but this is not ready for prime time IMHO.
• outside2344 10mo ago
  I don't want to say OpenAI is toast for general chat AI, but it sure looks like they are toast.
  • scrollop 10mo ago
    Looking at this they are: https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience https://youtu.be/4p73Uu_jZ10?si=x1gZopegCacznUDA&t=582 https://youtu.be/4p73Uu_jZ10?si=x1gZopegCacznUDA&t=582
  • Gigachad 10mo ago
    I’ve fully switched over to Gemini now. It seems significantly more useful, and is less of an automatic glaze machine that just restates your question and how smart you are for asking it.
    • radicality 10mo ago
      How do I get Gemini to be more proactive in finding/double-checking itself against new world information and doing searches? For that reason I still find chatgpt way better for me, many things I ask it first goes off to do online research and has up to date information - which is surprising as you would expect Google to be way better at this. For example, was asking Gemini 3 Pro recently about how to do something with a “RTX 6000 Blackwell 96GB” card, and it told me this card doesn’t exist and that I probably meant the rtx 6000 ada… Or just today I asked about something on macOS 26.2, and it told me to be cautious as it’s a beta release (it’s not). Whereas with chatgpt I trust the final output more since it very often goes to find live sources and info.
      • leemoore 10mo ago
        Gemini is bad at this sort of thing but I find all models tend to do this to some degree. You have to know this could be coming and give it indicators to assume that it’s training data is going to be out of date. And it must web search the latest as of today or this month. They aren’t taught to ask themselves “is my understanding of this topic based on info that is likely out of date” but understand after the fact. I usually just get annoyed and low key condescend to it for assuming its old ass training data is sufficient grounding for correcting me. That epistemic calibration is is something they are capable of thinking through if you point it out. But they aren’t trained to stop and ask/check themselves on how confident do they have a right to be. This is a meta cognitive interrupt that is socialized into girls between 6 and 9 and is socialized into boys between 11-13. While meta cognitive interrupt to calibrate to appropriate confidence levels of knowledge is a cognitive skill that models aren’t taught and humans learn socially by pissing off other humans. It’s why we get pissed off st models when they correct ua with old bad data. Our anger is the training tool to stop doing that. Just that they can’t take in that training signal at inference time
• Obertr 10mo ago
  At this point in time I start to believe OAI is very much behind on the models race and it can't be reversed Image model they have released is much worse than nano banana pro, ghibli moment did not happen Their GPT 5.2 is obviously overfit on benchmarks as a consensus of many developers and friends I know. So Opus 4.5 is staying on top when it comes to coding The weight of the ads money from google and general direction + founder sense of Brin brought the google massive giant back to life. None of my companies workflow run on OAI GPT right now. Even though we love their agent SDK, after claude agent SDK it feels like peanuts.
  • random9749832 10mo ago
    This is obviously trained on Pro 3 outputs for benchmaxxing.
    • CuriouslyC 10mo ago
      Not trained on pro, distilled from it.
      • viraptor 10mo ago
        What do you think distilled means...?
        • CuriouslyC 10mo ago
          It's good to keep the language clear, because you could pretrain/sft on outputs (as many labs do), which is not the same thing.
    • NitpickLawyer 10mo ago
      > for benchmaxxing. Out of all the big4 labs, google is the last I'd suspect of benchmaxxing. Their models have generally underbenched and overdelivered in real world tasks, for me, ever since 2.5 pro came out.
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• mmaunder 10mo ago
  I think about what would be most terrifying to Anthropic and OpenAI i.e. The absolute scariest thing that Google could do. I think this is it: Release low latency, low priced models with high cognitive performance and big context window, especially in the coding space because that is direct, immediate, very high ROI for the customer. Now, imagine for a moment they had also vertically integrated the hardware to do this.
  • avazhi 10mo ago
    "Now, imagine for a moment they had also vertically integrated the hardware to do this." Then you realise you aren't imagining it.
    • iwontberude 10mo ago
      “And then imagine Google designing silicon that doesn’t trail the industry. While you are there we may as well start to imagine Google figures out how to support a product lifecycle that isn’t AdSense” Google is great on the data science alone, every thing else is an after thought
      • avazhi 10mo ago
        https://blog.google/products/google-cloud/ironwood-google-tpu-things-to-know/ https://blog.google/products/google-cloud/ironwood-google-tp... "And then imagine Google designing silicon that doesn’t trail the industry." I'm def not a Google stan generally, but uh, have you even been paying attention? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_Processing_Unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_Processing_Unit
        • mmaunder 10mo ago
          It's not funny when I have to explain the joke.
          • avazhi 10mo ago
• timpera 10mo ago
  Looks awesome on paper. However, after trying it on my usual tasks, it is still very bad at using the French language, especially for creative writing. The gap between the Gemini 3 family and GPT-5 or Sonnet 4.5 is important for my usage. Also, I hate that I cannot send the Google models in a "Thinking" mode like in ChatGPT. When I send GPT 5.1 Thinking on a legal task and tell it to check and cite all sources, it takes +10 minutes to answer, but it did check everything and cite all its sources in the text; whereas the Gemini models, even 3 Pro, always answer after a few seconds and never cite their sources, making it impossible to click to check the answer. It makes the whole model unusable for these tasks. (I have the $20 subscription for both)
  • happyopossum 10mo ago
    > whereas the Gemini models, even 3 Pro, always answer after a few seconds and never cite their sources Definitely has not been my experience using 3 Pro in Gemini Enterprise - in fact just yesterday it took so long to do a similar task I’d thought something was broken. Nope, just re-chrcking a source
    • timpera 10mo ago
      Does Gemini Enterprise have more features? Just tried once again with the exact same prompt: GPT-5.1-Thinking took 12m46s and Gemini 3.0 Pro took about 20 seconds. The latter obviously has a dramatically worse answer as a result. (Also, the thinking trace is not in the correct language, and doesn't seem to show which sources have been read at which steps- there is only a "Sources" tab at the end of the answer.)
• sunaookami 10mo ago
  Sadly not available in the free tier...
  • raybb 10mo ago
    And they recently cut 2.5 flash to 20 requests per day and removed 2.5 pro all together.
    • sunaookami 10mo ago
      Huh wow you are right, they never sent any notice. Lame.
• SubiculumCode 10mo ago
  In Gemini Pro interface, I now have Fast, Thinking, and Pro options. I was a bit confused by that, but did find this: https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/new-model-levels-fast-thinking-pro-continue-to-be-a-problem-for-long-term-projects/112416 https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/new-model-levels-fast-thinki...
• elvin_d 10mo ago
  Gemini 3 are great models but lacking a few things: - app expirience is atrocious, poor UX all over the place. A few examples: silly jumps when reading the text when the model starting to respond, slide-over view in iPad breaking request while Claude and ChatGPT working fine. - Google offer 2 choices: your data used for whatever they want or if you want privacy, the app expirience going even worse.
• dandiep 10mo ago
  For someone looking to switch over to Gemini from OpenAI, are there any gotchas one should be aware of? E.g. I heard some mention of API limits and approvals? Or in terms of prompt writing? What advice do people have?
  • scrollop 10mo ago
    https://epoch.ai/benchmarks/simplebench https://epoch.ai/benchmarks/simplebench Just do it. I use a service where I have access to all SOTA models and many open sourced models, so I change models within chats, using MCPs eg start a chat with opus making a search with perplexity and grok deepsearch MCPs and google search, next query is with gpt 5 thinking Xhigh, next one with gemini 3 pro, all in the same conversation. It's fantastic! I can't imagine what it would be like again to be locked into using one (or two) companies. I have nothing to do with the guys who run it (the hosts from the podcast This day in AI, though if you're interested have a look in the simtheory.ai discord. I don't know how people use one service can manage...
    • dandiep 10mo ago
      99% of what I do is fine-tuned models, so there is a certain level of commitment I have to make around training and time to switch.
• zurfer 10mo ago
  It's a cool release, but if someone on the google team reads that: flash 2.5 is awesome in terms of latency and total response time without reasoning. In quick tests this model seems to be 2x slower. So for certain use cases like quick one-token classification flash 2.5 is still the better model. Please don't stop optimizing for that!
  • retropragma 10mo ago
    That's more of a flash-lite thing now, I believe
  • edvinasbartkus 10mo ago
    Did you try setting thinkingLevel to minimal? thinkingConfig: { thinkingLevel: "low", } More about it here https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/gemini-3#new_api_features_in_gemini_3 https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/gemini-3#new_api_featu...
    • zurfer 10mo ago
      Yes I tried it with minimal and it's roughly 3 seconds for prompts that take flash 2.5 1 second. On that note it would be nice to get these benchmark numbers based on the different reasoning settings.
  • Tiberium 10mo ago
    You can still set thinking budget to 0 to completely disable reasoning, or set thinking level to minimal or low.
    • andai 10mo ago
      >You cannot disable thinking for Gemini 3 Pro. Gemini 3 Flash also does not support full thinking-off, but the minimal setting means the model likely will not think (though it still potentially can). If you don't specify a thinking level, Gemini will use the Gemini 3 models' default dynamic thinking level, "high". https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/thinking#levels https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/thinking#levels
• Def_Os 10mo ago
  Consolidating their lead. I'm getting really excited about the next Gemma release.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• agentifysh 10mo ago
  so hat's why logan posed 3 lightning emojis. at $0.50/M for input and $3.00/M for output, this will put serious pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic now its almost as good as 5.2 and 4.5 but way faster and cheaper
• jdthedisciple 10mo ago
  To those saying "OpenAI is toast" ChatGPT still has 81% market share as of this very moment, vs Gemini's ~2%, and arguably still provides the best UX and branding. Everyone and their grandma knows "ChatGPT", who outside developers' bubble has even heard of Gemini Flash? Yea I don't think that dynamic is switching any time soon.
  • scrollop 10mo ago
    Says the CEO of MySpace.
  • riku_iki 10mo ago
    > ChatGPT still has 81% market share as of this very moment, vs Gemini's ~2% where did you get this from?
  • int_19h 10mo ago
    They won't switch "to Gemini". They will switch "to Google", meaning whatever's integrated into Chrome and Android.
• retinaros 10mo ago
  i might have missed the bandwagon on gemini but I never found the models to be reliable. now it seems they rank first in some hallucinations bench? I just always thought the taste of gpt or claude models was more interesting in the professional context and their end user chat experience more polished. are there obvious enterprise use cases where gemini models shine?
• RobinL 10mo ago
  Feels like Google is really pulling ahead of the pack here. A model that is cheap, fast and good, combined with Android and gsuite integration seems like such powerful combination. Presumably a big motivation for them is to be first to get something good and cheap enough they can serve to every Android device, ahead of whatever the OpenAI/Jony Ive hardware project will be, and way ahead of Apple Intelligence. Speaking for myself, I would pay quite a lot for truly 'AI first' phone that actually worked.
  • exegete 10mo ago
    Apple Intelligence is going to be Gemini https://www.macrumors.com/2025/11/05/apple-siri-google-gemini-partnership/ https://www.macrumors.com/2025/11/05/apple-siri-google-gemin...
    • willis936 10mo ago
      That's too bad. Apple's most interesting value proposition is running local inference with big privacy promises. They wouldn't need to be the highest performer to offer something a lot of people might want.
      • floundy 10mo ago
        Apple’s most interesting value proposition was ignoring all this AI junk and letting users click “not interested” on Apple Intelligence and never see it again. From a business perspective it’s a smart move (inasmuch as “integrating AI” is the default which I fundamentally disagree with) since Apple won’t be left holding the bag on a bunch of AI datacenters when/if the AI bubble pops. I don’t want to lose trust in Apple, but I literally moved away from Google/Android to try and retain control over my data and now they’re taking me… right back to Google. Guess I’ll retreat further into self-hosting.
        • willis936 10mo ago
          I also agree with this. Microsoft successfully removed my entire household from ever owning one of their products again after this year. Apple and linux make up the entire delta. As long as Apple doesn't take any crazy left turns with their privacy policy then it should be relatively harmless if they add in a google wrapper to iOS (and we won't need to take hard right turns with grapheneOS phones and framework laptops).
• croemer 10mo ago
  It's fast and good in Gemini CLI (even though Gemini CLI still lags far behind Claude as a harness).
• prompt_god 10mo ago
  it's better than Pro in a few evals. anyone who used, how is it for coding?
• xpil 10mo ago
  My main issue with Gemini is that business accounts can't delete individual conversations. You can only enable or disable Gemini, or set a retention period (3 months minimum), but there's no way to delete specific chats. I'm a paying customer, prices keep going up, and yet this very basic feature is still missing.
  • testfrequency 10mo ago
    This is the #1 thing that keeps me from going all in on Gemini. Their retention controls for both consumer and business suck. It’s the worst of any of the leaders.
  • ComputerGuru 10mo ago
    Use it over api.
  • strstr 10mo ago
    For my personal usage of ai-studio, I had to use autohotkey to record and replay my mouse deleting my old chats. I thought about cooking up a browser extension, but never got around to it.
• zone411 10mo ago
  Scores 92.0 on my Extended NYT Connections benchmark (https://github.com/lechmazur/nyt-connections/ https://github.com/lechmazur/nyt-connections/). Gemini 2.5 Flash scored 25.2, and Gemini 3 Pro scored 96.8.
• alooPotato 10mo ago
  I have a latency sensitive application - anyone know if any tools that let you compare time to first token and total latency for a bunch of models at once given a prompt. Ideally, run close to the DCs that serve the various models so we can take out network latency from the benchmark.
• i_love_retros 10mo ago
  Oh wow another LLM update!
• i_love_retros 10mo ago
  I'll take the hit to my 401k for this to all just go away. The comments here sound ridiculous.
  • blitz_skull 10mo ago
    What do you mean?
  • aoeusnth1 10mo ago
    Can you give an example of some ridiculous comments
• Workaccount2 10mo ago
  So gemini 3 flash (non thinking) is now the first model to get 50% on my "count the dog legs" image test. Gemini 3 pro got 20%, and everyone else has gotten 0%. I saw benchmarks showing 3 flash is almost trading blows with 3 pro, so I decided to try it. Basically it is an image showing a dog with 5 legs, an extra one photoshopped onto it's torso. Every models counts 4, and gemini 3 pro, while also counting 4, said the dog had a "large male anatomy". However it failed a follow-up saying 4 again. 3 flash counted 5 legs on the same image, however I added distinct a "tattoo" to each leg as an assist. These tattoos didn't help 3 pro or other models. So it is the first out of all the models I have tested to count 5 legs on the "tattooed legs" image. It still counted only 4 legs on the image without the tattoos. I'll give it 1/2 credit.
  • Valakas_ 10mo ago
    What if you also number the legs, but with an error like: 1,2,3,5,6. Or 1,2,3, ,4.
• Topfi 10mo ago
  By existing as part of Google results, AI Search makes them the least reliable search engine of all. Just to show an example I have searched for organically today with Kagi that I tried with Google for a quick real world test, looking for the exact 0-100kph times of the Honda Pan European ST1100, I got a result of 12-13 seconds, which isn't even in the correct stratosphere (roughly around 4sec), nor anywhere in the linked sources the model claims to rely on: https://share.google/aimode/Ui8yap74zlHzmBL5W https://share.google/aimode/Ui8yap74zlHzmBL5W No matter the model, AI Overview/Results in Google are just hallucinated nonsense, only providing roughly equivalent information to what is in the linked sources as a coincidence, rather than due to actually relying on them. Whether DuckDuckGo, Kagi, Ecosia or anything else, they are all objectively and verifiably better search engines than Google as of today. This isn't new either, nor has it gotten better. AI Overview has been and continues to be a mess that makes it very clear to me anyone claiming Google is still the "best" search engine results wise is lying to themselves. Anyone saying Google search in 2025 is good or even usable is objectively and verifiably wrong and claiming DDG or Kagi offer less usable results is equally unfounded. Either fix your models finally so they adhere to and properly quote sources like your competitors somehow manage or, preferably, stop forcing this into search.
• mmaunder 10mo ago
  Used the hell out of Gemini 3 Flash with some 3 Pro thrown in for the past 3 hours on CUDA/Rust/FFT code that is performance critical, and now have a gemini flavored cocaine hangover and have gone crawling back to Codex GPT 5.2 xhigh and am making slower progress but with higher quality code. Firstly, 3 Flash is wicked fast and seems to be very smart for a low latency model, and it's a rush just watching it work. Much like the YOLO mode that exists in Gemini CLI, Flash 3 seems to YOLO into solutions without fully understanding all the angles e.g. why something was intentionally designed in a way that at first glance may look wrong, but ended up this way through hard won experience. Codex gpt 5.2 xhigh on the other hand does consider more angles. It's a hard come-down off the high of using it for the first time because I really really really want these models to go that fast, and to have that much context window. But it ain't there. And turns out for my purposes the longer chain of thought that codex gpt 5.2 xhigh seems to engage in is a more effective approach in terms of outcomes. And I hate that reality because having to break a lift into 9 stages instead of just doing it in a single wicked fast run is just not as much fun!
• bayarearefugee 10mo ago
  Gemini is so awful at any sort of graceful degradation whenever they are under heavy load. Its great that they have these new fast models, but the release hype has made Gemini Pro pretty much unusable for hours. "Sorry, something went wrong" random sign-outs random garbage replies, etc
• simonw 10mo ago
  I had it draw four pelicans, one for each of its thinking levels (Gemini 3 Pro only had two thinking levels). Then I had it write me an <image-gallery> Web Component to help display the four pelicans it had made on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/17/gemini-3-flash/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/17/gemini-3-flash/ I also had it summarize this thread on Hacker News about itself: https://gist.github.com/simonw/b0e3f403bcbd6b6470e7ee0623be60aa#response https://gist.github.com/simonw/b0e3f403bcbd6b6470e7ee0623be6... llm \ -f hn:46301851 -m "gemini-3-flash-preview" \ -s 'Summarize the themes of the opinions expressed here. For each theme, output a markdown header. Include direct "quotations" (with author attribution) where appropriate. You MUST quote directly from users when crediting them, with double quotes. Fix HTML entities. Output markdown. Go long. Include a section of quotes that illustrate opinions uncommon in the rest of the piece' Where the `-f hn:xxxx` bit resolves via this plugin: https://github.com/simonw/llm-hacker-news https://github.com/simonw/llm-hacker-news
• FpUser 10mo ago
  >"Gemini 3 Flash demonstrates that speed and scale don’t have to come at the cost of intelligence." I am playing with Gemini 3 and the more I do the more I find it disappointing when discussing both tech and non-tech subject comparatively to ChatGPT. When it comes to non tech it seems like it was heavily indoctrinated and when it can not "prove" the point it abruptly cuts the conversation. When asked why, it says: formatting issues. Did it attend weasel courses? It is fast. I grant it.
• alex1138 10mo ago
  I so want to like Gemini. I so want to like Google, but beyond their history of shuttering products they also tend to have a bent towards censorship (as most directly seen with Youtube)
  • alex1138 10mo ago
    Downvotes from sycophants
• sabareesh 10mo ago
  Watch out these model are hallucinating lot more https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience?omniscience-index=omniscience-index-vs-cost&omniscience-hallucination-rate=hallucination-rate https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience?omnisc...
  • joecarpenter 10mo ago
    Isn't it the opposite? From the link: Scores range from -100 to 100, where 0 means as many correct as incorrect answers, and negative scores mean more incorrect than correct. Gemini 3 Flash scored +13 in the test, more correct answers than incorrect.
    • nemonemo 10mo ago
      One thing I don't understand is how come Gemini Pro seems much cheaper than Gemini Flash in the scatter graph.
    • sabareesh 10mo ago
      Nope lower is better compared to recent open ai models this is bad. I am looking at AA-Omniscience Hallucination Rate
  • andai 10mo ago
    This model has the best score on that benchmark. Edit: Huh... It does score highest in "Omniscience", but also very high in Hallucination Rate (where higher score is worse)...
    • sabareesh 10mo ago
      this has one of the worse score in AA-Omniscience Hallucination Rate
• qnleigh 10mo ago
  This model is breaking records on my benchmark of choice, which is 'the fraction of Hacker News comments that are positive.' Even people who avoid Google products on principle are impressed. Hardly anyone is arguing that ChatGPT is better in any respect (except brand recognition).
  • ipsum2 10mo ago
    Chatgpt 5.2 thinking is significantly better quality for most knowledge work, but it trades off in speed.
    • energy123 10mo ago
      That has been my experience. Primarily because it is allowed to expend far more test-time tokens than Gemini 3.0 Pro to solve the same prompt.
    • eli 10mo ago
      And GPT costs 4x as much
  • Palmik 10mo ago
    No offense, but that seems like a poor benchmark. These initial vibe checks are easily swayed by personal brand biases.
    • awestroke 10mo ago
      The brand bias is heavily against Google, not in Googles favor
      • Palmik 10mo ago
        In context of AI I'm mostly seeing anti-OpenAI pro-Google bias.
        • clarkmoreno 10mo ago
• yieldcrv 10mo ago
  anybody know the pattern of when these exit preview mode? I hate adding -preview to my model environment variable
• hereme888 10mo ago
  Any word on when fine-tuning might become available?
• gorbot 10mo ago
  Ive been using 2.5 pro or flash a ton at work and the pro was not noticeably more accurate, but significantly slower, so I used flash way more. This is super exciting
• lyy123 10mo ago
  111
• pancodecake 10mo ago
  [dead]
• robertwt7 10mo ago
  looking at the results, it seems like flash should be the default now when using Gemini? the difference between flash thinking and pro thinking is not noticeable anymore, not to mention the speed increase from flash! The only noticeable one is MRCR (long context) benchmark which tbh I also found it to be pretty bad in gemini 3 preview since launching
• jaigupta 10mo ago
  Only if I could figure out how to use it. I have been using Claude Code and enjoy it. I sometimes also try Codex which is also not bad. Trying to use Gemini cli is such a pain. I bought GDP Premium and configured GCP, setup environment variables, enabled preview features in cli and did all the dance around it and it won't let me use gemini 3. Why the hell I am even trying so hard?
  • android521 10mo ago
    use cursor. it allows you to choose any model to use.
  • jdanbrown 10mo ago
    Have you tried OpenRouter (https://openrouter.ai https://openrouter.ai)? I’ve been happy using it as a unified api provider with great model coverage (including Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Grok, and the major open models). They charge 5% on top of each model’s api costs, but I think it’s worth it to have one centralized place to insert my money and monitor my usage. I like being able to switch out models without having to change my tools, and I like being able to easily head-to-head compare claude/gemini/gpt when I get stuck on a tricky problem. Then you just have to find a coding tool that works with OpenRouter. Afaik claude/codex/cursor don’t, at least not without weird hacks, but various of the OSS tools do — cline, roo code, opencode, etc. I recently started using opencode (https://github.com/sst/opencode https://github.com/sst/opencode), which is like an open version of claude code, and I’ve been quite happy with it. It’s a newer project so There Will Be Bugs, but the devs are very active and responsive to issues and PRs.
    • jaigupta 10mo ago
      I have used OpenRouter before but in this case I was trying to use it like Claude Code (agentic coding with a simple fixed monthly subscription). I don't want to pay per use via direct APIs as I am afraid it might have surprising bills. My point was, why Google makes it so damn hard even for paid subscriptions where it was supposed to work.
    • Palmik 10mo ago
• gustavoaca1997 10mo ago
  Cannot wait for it to be available in GH Copilot
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• rw2 10mo ago
  They didn't put Opus 4.5 on the model card to compare
• inshard 10mo ago
  Tested it on Gemini CLI and the experience as good if not better than Claude Code. Gemini CLI has come a long way and is arguably likely to surpass Claude Code at this rate of progress.
  • MillionOClock 10mo ago
    What are your favorite features? I recently downloaded it and also use Codex CLI and GitHub Copilot in VS Code but I don't really know what specific features it has others might not have.
    • inshard 10mo ago
      The UI is better - they box the specific types of actions the orchestrator agent takes with a clear categorization. The standard quality of life shortcuts like type a number to respond to an MCQ are present here as well. They use specialized sub agents such as one with big context window to find context in the codebase. The quotas appear to be much more generous vs CC. The agent memory management between compacting cycles seems to have a few tricks CC is missing. Also, with 3.0 Flash, it feels faster with the same level of agency and intelligence. It has a feature to focus into an interactive shell where bash commands are being executed by the orchestrator agent. Doesn't feel like Google is trying to push you to buy more credits or is relying on this product for its financial survival - I suspect CC has some dark patterns around this where the agents runs cycles of token in circles with minimal progress on bugs before you have to top up your wallet. Early days still.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• cakealert 10mo ago
  Gemini 2.5 was a full broadside on OpenAI's ship. After Gemini 3.0 the OpenAI damage control crews all drowned. Not only is it vastly better, it's also free. I find this particular benchmark to be in agreement with my experiences: https://simple-bench.com https://simple-bench.com
• zkmon 10mo ago
  I asked it to draft an email with a business proposal and it puts the date on letter as October 26, 2023. Then I asked it why it did so. It replies saying that the templates it was trained on might be anchored to that date. Gemini 3 Pro also puts that same date on letter. I didn't ask it why.
  • zkmon 10mo ago
    https://ibb.co/vvcKBkL6 https://ibb.co/vvcKBkL6
  • muixoozie 10mo ago
    >ask it why Always cracks me up asking the LLM why it said something like it really knows and won't just make up something plausible. Scary thing is how similar we are in this regard. People confabulate and rationalize things the time, but it's especially apparent in people who engage in denial of illness (anosognosia) due to brain damage. One well documented example is stroke damaging the right hemisphere of the brain and paralyzing the left side of the body. Some will deny their paralyzed arm is paralyzed; Make up all sorts of excuses if cross examined / confronted with evidence of illness [0], or practically hallucinate their arm working, fail to notice it's not working etc. Video goes into like half a dozen experiments least. Mini spoiler: can ask someone with similar brain damage a ridiculous question "why did you just do x" (when did didn't do anything) and they'll confabulate an answer. Reminds me of split brain patients videos rationalizing why they did something (speaking left side of the brain) that was communicated visually only to the right hemisphere. [1]. Anyways, I was rewatching the anosognosia video the other day for the first time in like a decade and it really made me wonder how many evolutionary brain specializations it would take to more closely mimic human behavior in a machine. - 0; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDHJDKPeB2A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDHJDKPeB2A - 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfGwsAdS9Dc&t=347 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfGwsAdS9Dc&t=347
• tomashubelbauer 10mo ago
  `gemini update` - error `gemini` and then `/update` - unknown command I also had similar issues with Claude Code in the past. Everyone should take a page out of Bun's playbook. I never had `bun update` fail. Edit: Also, I wish NPM wasn't the distribution mechanism for these TUIs. I suspect NPM's interplay with global packages and macOS permissions is what's causing the issue.
• lazto 10mo ago
  Wow, this is really an amazing model, and the experience is truly stunning.
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
• d4rkp4ttern 10mo ago
  Curious how well it would do in Gemini CLI. Probably not that good, at least from looking at the terminal-bench-2 benchmark where it’s significantly behind Gemini-3-Pro (47.6% vs 54.2%), and I didn’t really like G3Pro in Gemini-CLI anyway. Also curious that the posted benchmark omitted comparison with Opus 4.5, which in Claude-Code is anecdotally at/near the top right now.
• mark_l_watson 10mo ago
  I only use commercial LLM vendors who I consider to be “commercially viable.” I don’t want to deal with companies who are losing money selling me products. For now the venders I pay for are 90% Google, and 10% combination of Chinese models and from the French company Mistral. I love the new Gemini 3 Flash model - it hits so many sweet-spots for me. The API is inexpensive enough for my use cases that I don’t even think about the cost. My preference is using local open models with Ollama and LM Studio, but commercial models are also a large part of my use cases.
• addajones 10mo ago
  I really wish Google would make a macOS desktop app for Gemini just like ChatGPT and Claude have. I'd use it much more if I could login with my sub and not have to open a web browser every single time.
• ofermend 10mo ago
  Gemini-3-flash is now on Vectara hallucination leaderboard, and rated at 13.5% grounded hallucination rate. https://github.com/vectara/hallucination-leaderboard https://github.com/vectara/hallucination-leaderboard
• XCSme 10mo ago
  LLMs are weird, Gemini 3 flash beats Gemini 3 Pro on some benchmarks (MMMU-PRO)