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Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

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Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#51

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" int…

I asked a similar question yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46290797

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#54
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.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#55
post #49

OpenAI is pretty firmly in the rear-view mirror now.

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.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#57
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.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#58

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

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.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#59
post #4

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

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.

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