So now we're in the situation that Google’s recommended "for most tasks" Flash-tier model, Gemini 3.5 Flash, appears to be only marginally ahead of leading open

So now we're in the situation that Google’s recommended "for most tasks" Flash-tier model, Gemini 3.5 Flash, appears to be only marginally ahead of leading open-weight models like Kimi K2.6 and MiMo V2.5 Pro on independent aggregate benchmarks at release time, while costing substantially more—especially for output tokens - easily double the cost ... Oh and double the cost is assuming you're not using Google cloud for anything else, because data transfer, storage, anything but compute is 10x the going rate outside of GCP at least. Plus you can run both Kimi K2.6 and MiMo V2.5 locally at marginal cost (ie. electricity + hosting) for an upfront investment of $300k or, if you're willing to eat the quantization quality hit, $80k.