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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

#361

Watch out these model are hallucinating lot more https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience?omnisc...

This model has the best score on that benchmark.

Edit: Huh... It does score highest in "Omniscience", but also very high in Hallucination Rate (where higher score is worse)...

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#362

Watch out these model are hallucinating lot more https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience?omnisc...

Isn't it the opposite? From the link: Scores range from -100 to 100, where 0 means as many correct as incorrect answers, and negative scores mean more incorrect than correct. Gemini 3 Flash scored +13 in the test, more correct answers than incorrect.

One thing I don't understand is how come Gemini Pro seems much cheaper than Gemini Flash in the scatter graph.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#363
post #352
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…

So this is an interesting benchmark, because if the answer is actually in the top 3 google results, then my python script that runs a google search, scrapes the top n results and shoves them into a crappy LLM would pass your benchmark too! Which also implies that (for most tasks), most of the weights in a LLM are unnecessary, since they are spent on memorizing the long tail of Common Crawl... but maybe memorizing inf…

I've tried doing this query with search enabled in LLMs before, which is supposed to effectively do that, and even with that they didn't give very good answers. It's a very physical kind of thing, and its easy to conflate with other similar descriptions, so they would frequently just conflate various different things and give some horrible mash-up answer that wasn't about the specific thing I'd asked about.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#364
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

> Don’t let the “flash” name fool you I think it's bad naming on google's part. "flash" implies low quality, fast but not good enough. I get less negative feeling looking at "mini" models.

Interesting. Flash suggests more power to me than Mini. I never use gpt-5-mini in the UI whereas Flash appears to be just as good as Pro just a lot faster.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#365
post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't the models typically train on their input too? I.e. submitting the question also carries a risk/chance of it getting picked up? I guess they get such a large input of queries that they can only realistically check and therefore use a small fraction? Though maybe they've come up with some clever trick to make use of it anyway?

Given they asked in on LMArena, yes.

Yeah, probably asking on LMArena makes this an invalid benchmark going forward, especially since I think Google is particular active in testing models on LMArena (as evidenced by the fact that I got their preview for this question).

I'll need to find a new one, or actually put together a set of questions to use instead of just a single benchmark.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#366
post #124

Does anyone else understand what the difference is between Gemini 3 'Thinking' and 'Pro'? Thinking "Solves complex problems" and Pro "Thinks longer for advanced math & code". I assume that these are just different reasoning levels for Gemini 3, but I can't even find mention of there being 2 versions anywhere, and the API doesn't even mention the Thinking-Pro dichotomy.

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…

AGI is hard but we can solve most tasks with artificial stupidity in an `until done`.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#367
post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The thing is, I see people use it for tricky niche knowledge all the time; using it as an alternative to doing a Google search. So I want to have a general idea of how good it is at this. I found something that was niche, but not super niche; I could easily find a good, human written answer in the top couple of results of a Google search. But until now, all LLM answers I've gotten for it have been complete hallucinat…

And Google themselves obviously believe that too as they happily insert AI summaries at the top of most serps now.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#368
post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hard to find info but I think the -chat versions of 5.1 and 5.2 (gpt-5.2-chat) are what you're looking for. They might just be an alias for the same model with very low reasoning though. I've seen other providers do the same thing, where they offer a reasoning and non reasoning endpoint. Seems to work well enough.

It's weird they don't document this stuff. Like understanding things like tool call latency and time to first token is extremely important in application development.

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do I get Gemini to be more proactive in finding/double-checking itself against new world information and doing searches? For that reason I still find chatgpt way better for me, many things I ask it first goes off to do online research and has up to date information - which is surprising as you would expect Google to be way better at this. For example, was asking Gemini 3 Pro recently about how to do something wit…

Gemini is bad at this sort of thing but I find all models tend to do this to some degree. You have to know this could be coming and give it indicators to assume that it’s training data is going to be out of date. And it must web search the latest as of today or this month. They aren’t taught to ask themselves “is my understanding of this topic based on info that is likely out of date” but understand after the fact. I usually just get annoyed and low key condescend to it for assuming its old ass training data is sufficient grounding for correcting me.

That epistemic calibration is is something they are capable of thinking through if you point it out. But they aren’t trained to stop and ask/check themselves on how confident do they have a right to be. This is a meta cognitive interrupt that is socialized into girls between 6 and 9 and is socialized into boys between 11-13. While meta cognitive interrupt to calibrate to appropriate confidence levels of knowledge is a cognitive skill that models aren’t taught and humans learn socially by pissing off other humans. It’s why we get pissed off st models when they correct ua with old bad data. Our anger is the training tool to stop doing that. Just that they can’t take in that training signal at inference time

Re: Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

#370
post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, I see people use it for tricky niche knowledge all the time; using it as an alternative to doing a Google search. So I want to have a general idea of how good it is at this. I found something that was niche, but not super niche; I could easily find a good, human written answer in the top couple of results of a Google search. But until now, all LLM answers I've gotten for it have been complete hallucinat…

And Google themselves obviously believe that too as they happily insert AI summaries at the top of most serps now.

Or maybe Google knows most people search inane, obvious things?
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