Am I really so old that when someone says "Flash" my immediate response is... "consider HTML5 instead" ??
They were CPU killers but man those Flash websites were gorgeous (talking mostly about MU Online "private" servers)
Gemini 3.5 Flash
321–330 of 692 posts
Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash
#322Per million input/output tokens: Gemini 2.5 flash: $0.30/$2.50 Gemini 3.0 flash preview: $0.50/$3.00 Gemini 3.5 flash: $1.50/$9.00 Interesting pricing direction. I don't think we have ever seen a 3x price increase for in the immediate next same-sized model (and lol @ 3 only ever getting a preview). 3.5 flash costs similar to Gemini 2.5 pro which was $1.25/$10
If Google is actually getting cheaper inference than everyone else with their TPUs, this smells like trouble to me. Maybe serving LLMs at a profit is proving difficult. Or maybe they think because their benchmarks are good they can ramp up the prices. Seems like they don’t have the market share to justify a move like that yet to me.
This is trouble if you're not Google/OpenAI/Anthropic: they're all shifting towards pricing for the economic value of the knowledge work they're aiding.
The economic value increases non-linearly as models get more intelligent: being 10% more capable unlocks way more than 10% in downstream value.
That's trouble because the non-linear component means at some point their margins will stop primarily defined by the cost of compute, and start being dominated by how intelligent the model is.
At that point you can expect compute prices to skyrocket and free capacity to plummet, so even if you have a model that's "good enough", you can't afford to deploy it at scale.
(and in terms of timing, I think they're all well under the curve for pricing by economic value. Everyone is talking about Uber spending millions on tokens, but how much payroll did they pay while devs scrolled their phones and waited for CC to do their job?)
Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash
#323The pelican is a lot : https://github.com/simonw/llm-gemini/issues/133#issuecomment... Not a great bicycle though, it forgot the bar between the pedals and the back wheel and weirdly tangled the other bars. Expensive too - that pelican cost 13 cents: https://www.llm-prices.com/#it=11&ot=14403&sel=gemini-3.5-fl...
They are just trolling you now
Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not priced at inference cost. My guess: it's the price at which they make more money than if they rent the TPUs to other companies. The Gemini team has had trouble securing enough TPUs for their user's needs. They struggle with load and their rate limits are really bad. Maybe at a higher price, they have a better chance at getting more TPUs assigned?
The cost at such they could rent out the TPUs, i.e. the market rate, is the inference cost. Just because you are vertically integrated doesn't mean you get to discount the one business units products to the other. Doing so discounts the opportunity cost you pay and is just bad accounting.
Look up “double marginalisation”.
Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very little of what made the Flash culture so fun made its way into HTML5.
I dunno, the tools are kind of there. Browsers have canvases and JavaScript and SVGs and sound. The communities are around; they're just kind of dispersed. There's no one website that is THE place for fun stuff. Instead, there are dozens, and most of them suck. There's still fun stuff, though. I stumbled upon this bit of insanity just yesterday: https://tykenn.itch.io/trees-hate-you . It would have fit in fabulously…
Edit: looks like you linkes something created with Unity?
Not sure, I'm not versed in game dev. So maybe my point about creation tools is moot.
However, 3D content always seems very samey to me, in a way that cartoons and regular animation don't. So the rest of my comment should still express what I mean.
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Flash had a WYSIWYG editor aimed at media creators who treat programming at best as an afterthought.
Flash was mostly about ease of tweening and extremely flexible vector graphics engine combined with an intuitive creation tool.
So the "Flash vs HTML/JS/SVG/CSS..." debate is not just about technical capabilities of the medium.
Of course there are many fun web apps in the browser, or as native apps, too. But Flash attracted all kinds of slightly nerdy people with cultural things to say, not just web devs with a lot of free time.
What "HTML5"/browser web technology doesn't offer is this intuitive, visual creation pipeline, and this kind of speaks for itself!
Also, I think the Flash "creator's" age is not separable from its time: using Flash wasn't trivial either.
There were just more people with interesting ideas, free time, and a wholistic talent for expressing their humor and ideas, combined with the curiosity and skill to learn using Flash (of course only as a licensed copy purchased from Macromedia).
People like this today are probably more often hyper-optimizing social media creators, and/or not terminally online.
In other words: I don't think the typical Newgrounds creator would have taken the time and effort to translate a stickman collage, meme, or other idea into a web app / animation.
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And to add even more preaching: I think that "creating" things using AI produces exactly the opposite effect: feed it an original idea, and the result will be a regression to the mean.
Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's profitable, why haven't they reported any profits? People like Ed Zitron have done the math and it just doesn't add up. I mean he just published this piece today: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-too-expensive/
Amazon was unprofitable for over a decade, and they were public. Theres no incentive to be profitable as a private company if you can continue to raise money. Ed Zitron and Gary Marcus are... confused.
But I've been told here -- over and over again -- that the cost of inference was going to go down as the technology matured.
The trend lines are going in the opposite direction.
Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
They probably never intended to keep serving cheap models. This is a natural way to introduce the squeeze, now that they have people who built services on their API. It makes a lot of sense to have an abstraction layer where the provider doesn't matter. If you are working in Kotlin, Koog is excellent.
switching models is insanely cheap compared to token cost on anything signficant, this is a take so cynical it misses the reality
in any corporate or half compliance-relevant setting switching isn't trivial. new DPA, subprocessor notifications, TIA, procurement review, security questionnaires, plus re-running your evals because prompts don't transfer 1:1. token cost is just one of the line items.
Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gen AI is unprofitable, especially at the insanely cheap rates they've been offering to get people in the door. So expect more increases in the future.
It is insanely profitable though, if you cut out r&d cost, plus the marketing and loss leaders. Don't let them gaslight you. Even anthropic who does not own any hardware still have a big margin providing claude models.
Everything is insanely profitable if you ignore the costs.
Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you explain what you mean?
LLM pre-training models risk being unable to be updated with data from after 2025, as much of it is corrupted with LLM-generated content. We might be locked into outdated knowledge, where only whitelisted sources decide what to include. Taking into account the sometimes blind belief that 'LLMs know everything', the outcome could be very costly, especially for technologies and businesses unfortunate enough to emerge a…
But ChatGPT has been popular since early 2023, and even before it there was no shortage of low-quality content on the web.
If anything, this model being trained up to 2025 is a positive sign that the "circular LLM training" problem hasn't (yet) become unmanagable.
The year-long delay is probably just due to how long it takes to test/refine a cutting-edge model. It's surely possible to train one faster, but Google wouldn't want to release a new model unless it's going to top the usual benchmarks.
Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash
#330While I am excited, the price compared to gemini 3 flash preview which I used for the longest time is x3 more. Upon arrival of deepseek v4 flash, I am a happy user of deepseek. We will see how long that reign would last after I try this new gemini.