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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

#221

Post by nevir »

bgirard wrote: post #45
simonsarris wrote: post #10

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…

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.

I think a big part of the switching cost is the cost of learning a different model's nuances. Having good intuition for what works/doesn't, how to write effective prompts, etc.

Maybe someday future models will all behave similarly given the same prompt, but we're not quite there yet

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#222

Post by jdthedisciple »

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.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#223

Post by scrollop »

samyok wrote: 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

Alright so we have more benchmarks including hallucinations and flash doesn't do well with that, though generally it beats gemini 3 pro and GPT 5.1 thinking and gpt 5.2 thinking xhigh (but then, sonnet, grok, opus, gemini and 5.1 beat 5.2 xhigh) - everything. Crazy.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#224

Post by scrollop »

fariszr wrote: post #7

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 fo…

This one is more powerful than openai models, including gpt 5.2 (which is worse on various benchmarks than 5.1 which is worse than 5.1, and that's where 5.2 was using XHIGH, whiulst the others were on high eg: https://youtu.be/4p73Uu_jZ10?si=x1gZopegCacznUDA&t=582 )

https://epoch.ai/benchmarks/simplebench

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#225

Post by scrollop »

kingstnap wrote: post #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. Tha…

Also

https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience

Prepare to be amazed

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#226

Post by tonymet »

samyok wrote: 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

Can you be more specific on the tasks you’ve found exceptional ?

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#227

Post by golem14 »

djeastm wrote: post #95
sv123 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found copilot within the Azure portal to be basically useless for solving most problems.

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.

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."

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#229

Post by scrollop »

dandiep wrote: post #168

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?

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...

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#230

Post by jauntywundrkind »

happyopossum wrote: post #135
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Two orders of magnitude would imply that these models cost $28/m in and $42/m out. Nothing is even close to that.

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.

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