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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

#261
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

I think google is the only one that still produce general knowledge LLM right now claude is coding model from the start but GPT is in more and more becoming coding model

Coding is basically an edge case for LLMs too.

Pretty much every person in the first (and second) world is using AI now, and only small fraction of those people are writing software. This is also reflected in OAI's report from a few months ago that found programming to only be 4% of tokens.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think google is the only one that still produce general knowledge LLM right now claude is coding model from the start but GPT is in more and more becoming coding model

I agree with this observation. Gemini does feel like code-red for basically every AI company like chatgpt,claude etc. too in my opinion if the underlying model is both fast and cheap and good enough I hope open source AI models catch up to gemini 3 / gemini 3 flash. Or google open sources it but lets be honest that google isnt open sourcing gemini 3 flash and I guess the best bet mostly nowadays in open source is pro…

Open source models are riding coat tails, they are basically just distilling the giant SOTA models, hence perpetually being 4-6mos behind.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#263
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

I wonder at what point will everyone who over-invested in OpenAI will regret their decision (expect maybe Nvidia?). Maybe Microsoft doesn't need to care, they get to sell their models via Azure.

Very soon, because clearly OpenAI is in very serious trouble. They are scaled and have no business model and a competitor that is much better than them at almost everything (ads, hardware, cloud, consumer, scaling).

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#264
post #251

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.

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.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#265

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.

Gpt 5.2 pro is well beyond that iirc

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#266
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Googl…

Advanced reasoning LLM's simulate many parts of AGI and feel really smart, but fall short in many critical ways. - An AGI wouldn't hallucinate, it would be consistent, reliable and aware of its own limitations - An AGI wouldn't need extensive re-training, human reinforced training, model updates. It would be capable of true self-learning / self-training in real time. - An AGI would demonstrate real genuine understand…

Thanks for humoring my stupid question with a great answer. I was kind of hoping for something like this :).

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#267
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

I'm a significant genAI skeptic.

I periodically ask them questions about topics that are subtle or tricky, and somewhat niche, that I know a lot about, and find that they frequently provide extremely bad answers. There have been improvements on some topics, but there's one benchmark question that I have that just about every model I've tried has completely gotten wrong.

Tried it on LMArena recently, got a comparison between Gemini 2.5 flash and a codenamed model that people believe was a preview of Gemini 3 flash. Gemini 2.5 flash got it completely wrong. Gemini 3 flash actually gave a reasonable answer; not quite up to the best human description, but it's the first model I've found that actually seems to mostly correctly answer the question.

So, it's just one data point, but at least for my one fairly niche benchmark problem, Gemini 3 Flash has successfully answered a question that none of the others I've tried have (I haven't actually tried Gemini 3 Pro, but I'd compared various Claude and ChatGPT models, and a few different open weights models).

So, guess I need to put together some more benchmark problems, to get a better sample than one, but it's at least now passing a "I can find the answer to this in the top 3 hits in a Google search for a niche topic" test better than any of the other models.

Still a lot of things I'm skeptical about in all the LLM hype, but at least they are making some progress in being able to accurately answer a wider range of questions.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this observation. Gemini does feel like code-red for basically every AI company like chatgpt,claude etc. too in my opinion if the underlying model is both fast and cheap and good enough I hope open source AI models catch up to gemini 3 / gemini 3 flash. Or google open sources it but lets be honest that google isnt open sourcing gemini 3 flash and I guess the best bet mostly nowadays in open source is pro…

Open source models are riding coat tails, they are basically just distilling the giant SOTA models, hence perpetually being 4-6mos behind.

So basically the proprietary models are devalued to almost 0 in about 4-6 months. Can they recover the training costs + profit margin every 4 months?

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#270

I don't want to say OpenAI is toast for general chat AI, but it sure looks like they are toast.

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.
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