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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

#291

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

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.

> Pretty much every person in the first (and second) world is using AI now

This sounds like you live in a huge echo chamber. :-(

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#293
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.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#294
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…

Humans can fail at some of these qualifications, often without guile: - being consistent and knowing their limitations - people do not universally demonstrate effective understanding and mental modeling.

I don't believe the "consciousness" qualification is at all appropriate, as I would argue that it is a projection of the human machine's experience onto an entirely different machine with a substantially different existential topology -- relationship to time and sensorium. I don't think artificial general intelligence is a binary label which is applied if a machine rigidly simulates human agency, memory, and sensing.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expect open weights models to always lag behind; training is resource-intensive and it’s much easier to finance if you can make money directly from the result. So in a year we may have a ~700B open weights model that competes with Gemini 3, but by then we’ll have Gemini 4, and other things we can’t predict now.

There will be diminishing returns though as the future models won't be thah much better we will reach a point where the open source model will be good enough for most things. And the need for being on the latest model no longer so important. For me the bigger concern which I have mentioned on other AI related topics is that AI is eating all the production of computer hardware so we should be worrying about hardware p…

I had a similar opinion, that we were somewhere near the top of the sigmoid curve of model improvement that we could achieve in the near term. But given continued advancements, I’m less sure that prediction holds.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#296
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

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.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#297
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

OpenAI made a huge mistake neglecting fast inferencing models. Their strategy was gpt 5 for everything, which hasn't worked out at all. I'm really not sure what model OpenAI wants me to use for my applications that require lower latency. If I follow their advice in their API docs about which models I should use for faster responses I get told either use GPT 5 low thinking, or replace gpt 5 with gpt 4.1, or switch to…

Yeah, I'm surprised that they've been through GT-5.1 and GPT-5.1-Codex and GPT-5.1-Codex-Max and now GPT-5.2 but their most recent mini model is still GPT-5-mini.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#298
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!

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#299
post #273
post #238

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. Speakin…

What will you use the ai in the phone to do for you? I can understand tablets and smart glasses being able to leverage smol AI much better than a phone which is reliant on apps for most of the work.

I desperately want to be able to real-time dictate actions to take on my phone.

Stuff like:

"Open Chrome, new tab, search for xyz, scroll down, third result, copy the second paragraph, open whatsapp, hit back button, open group chat with friends, paste what we copied and send, send a follow-up laughing tears emoji, go back to chrome and close out that tab"

All while being able to just quickly glance at my phone. There is already a tool like this, but I want the parsing/understanding of an LLM and super fast response times.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#300

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…

I would expect open weights models to always lag behind; training is resource-intensive and it’s much easier to finance if you can make money directly from the result. So in a year we may have a ~700B open weights model that competes with Gemini 3, but by then we’ll have Gemini 4, and other things we can’t predict now.

If Gemini 3 flash is really confirmed close to Opus 4.5 at coding and a similarly capable model is open weights, I want to buy a box with an usb cable that has that thing loaded, because today that’s enough to run out of engineering work for a small team.
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