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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

#311
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Ther…

This new model is absurdly quick on my phone and for launch day, wonder if it's additional capacity/lower demand or if this is what we can expect going forward.

On a related note, why would you want to break down your tasks to that level surely it should be smart enough to do some of that without you asking and you can just state your end goal.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#312
post #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…

Hi. I am curious what was the benchmark question? Cheers!

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#313
post #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…

I don't think tricky niche knowledge is the sweet spot for genai and it likely won't be for some time. Instead, it's a great replacement for rote tasks where a less than perfect performance is good enough. Transcription, ocr, boilerplate code generation, etc.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemini isn't code red for Anthropic. Gemini threatens none of Anthropic's positioning in the market.

Yes it does. I never use Claude anymore outside of agentic tasks.

so? agentic tasks is where the promised agi is for many of us

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#315
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hi. I am curious what was the benchmark question? Cheers!

The problem with publicly disclosing these is that if lots of people adopt them they will become targeted to be in the model and will no longer be a good benchmark.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#316
post #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…

Even the most magical wonderful auto-hammer is gonna be bad at driving in screws. And, in this analogy I can't fault you because there are people trying to sell this hammer as a screwdriver. My opinion is that it's important to not lose sight of the places where it is useful because of the places where it isn't.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#317

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.

That may be so, but I rather suspect the breakdown would be very different if you only count paid tokens. Coding is one of the few things where you can actually get enough benefit out of AI right now to justify high-end subscriptions (or high pay-per-token bills).

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#318
post #30

This is awesome. No preview release either, which is great to production. They are pushing the prices higher with each release though: API pricing is up to $0.5/M for input and $3/M for output For comparison: Gemini 3.0 Flash: $0.50/M for input and $3.00/M for output Gemini 2.5 Flash: $0.30/M for input and $2.50/M for output Gemini 2.0 Flash: $0.15/M for input and $0.60/M for output Gemini 1.5 Flash: $0.075/M for inp…

is there a website where i can compare openai, anthropic and gemini models on cost/token ?

https://openrouter.ai/models

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#319

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…

> reflects either training on the test set or some sort of cracked way to pack a ton of parametric knowledge into a Flash Model

That's what MoE is for. It might be that with their TPUs, they can afford lots of params, just so long as the activated subset for each token is small enough to maintain throughput.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#320
I had it draw four pelicans, one for each of its thinking levels (Gemini 3 Pro only had two thinking levels). Then I had it write me an Web Component to help display the four pelicans it had made on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/17/gemini-3-flash/

I also had it summarize this thread on Hacker News about itself:

https://gist.github.com/simonw/b0e3f403bcbd6b6470e7ee0623be6...

  llm \
  -f hn:46301851 -m "gemini-3-flash-preview" \
  -s 'Summarize the themes of the opinions expressed here.
  For each theme, output a markdown header.
  Include direct "quotations" (with author attribution) where appropriate.
  You MUST quote directly from users when crediting them, with double quotes.
  Fix HTML entities. Output markdown. Go long. Include a section of quotes that illustrate opinions uncommon in the rest of the piece'
Where the `-f hn:xxxx` bit resolves via this plugin: https://github.com/simonw/llm-hacker-news
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