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Gemini 3.6 Flash

console.cloud.google.com

51–60 of 78 posts

Re: Gemini 3.6 Flash

#51
I know that Flash is obviously no Opus or Fable. That being said, when I want a very quick response, my go-to is Gemini Flash. It's just really damn fast and generally tends to be accurate enough.

Re: Gemini 3.6 Flash

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Antigravity is such a dumb name. An-ti-gra-vi-ty (5) is long, Ge-mi-ni (3) was better. Aren’t Marketing/PR people at FAANG supposed to be among the best in the industry?

Just as ChatGPT is now called "Chat" by the kids (go ahead and finish grinding your teeth, I'll wait...), if Antigravity takes off then it'll get an irksome nickname like Antigrav or just Grav.

the kids don't call it that. only grown men in the bay area call it that.

Re: Gemini 3.6 Flash

#53
post #37

I find their models are pretty good for answering every day questions, and with their large user base, I’m sure they’re getting lots of usage.

They also provide the most usage for free and in the cheap paid plans.

They're cannibalizing their own search ad revenue. Very strange decision.

Re: Gemini 3.6 Flash

#54
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has not had a single SOTA model since about a year now.

You are exaggerating. 3.1 Pro came out in February of this year.

... and it was not SOTA at the time of release. Gemini 3.1 Pro was previewed on 19 February 2026. It just barely beat GPT-5.3 and was roughly equal with Sonnet 4.6. Better according to some, worse according to others. And that lasted about 10 days (until GPT-5.4 came out which was also not a huge jump). And these are large averages. On coding or terminal Gemini 3.1 Pro was not close to Opus 4.6. Also it only matches the GLM 5 open model, more or less.

Last time Google had a "everybody agrees" SOTA model was Gemini 3 in November 2025, it beat GPT-5.1, it really was better and held it for a month.

Currently Google's best model doesn't match open models, in any category (performance, price or speed), in fact the last 4 open weight champions all beat Google's best model.

Here's a plot of the evolution: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1v20g29/kimik3_...

Re: Gemini 3.6 Flash

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also provide the most usage for free and in the cheap paid plans.

They're cannibalizing their own search ad revenue. Very strange decision.

They have no choice - if they don't offer AI assisted search, someone else will eat their lunch.

Re: Gemini 3.6 Flash

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also provide the most usage for free and in the cheap paid plans.

They're cannibalizing their own search ad revenue. Very strange decision.

IMO they are being pretty smart about this - the conventional wisdom is to cannibalize your own products before someone else does, and LLMs are obviously a major threat to search, with ChatGPT probably the biggest threat.

Google's "AI Overview" search results, which started out awful, are now much improved - can be actually useful - as long as you are not asking specialist questions, and the Gemini chat and voice apps are also great for everyday use, although not sure if they are yet monetizing this (volume probably a lot less than search I'd guess).

The Apple Siri-Gemini deal is also a significant way for Google to not get sidelined.

Re: Gemini 3.6 Flash

#58

I know that Flash is obviously no Opus or Fable. That being said, when I want a very quick response, my go-to is Gemini Flash. It's just really damn fast and generally tends to be accurate enough.

Yeah, Gemini Flash is my daily go to. It's certainly quite capable - yesterday it talked me though fixing my Ubuntu desktop (rebuilding NVIDIA driver) after an update caused it to boot into low resolution mode.

Re: Gemini 3.6 Flash

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also provide the most usage for free and in the cheap paid plans.

They're cannibalizing their own search ad revenue. Very strange decision.

In the bigger picture, people were starting to catch on to the fact that Google's search product was becoming increasingly useless.

Around here we'd come to that conclusion at least a couple of years ago, due to abusive SEO and so forth. And that understanding was becoming even more widespread.

I don't know if Google's got the later parts of the game figured out yet, but I have to think that they'd realized that Search was dying. While there's still some value there, may as well use it as a hook to pull people into what they expect to be the next era.

Re: Gemini 3.6 Flash

#60
post #27

I don't like how it compared itself to 5.6 Luna instead of Sol, and still losing on some metrics. You will not see me using this over even 5.6 Sol-light

Claude's free usage is so limited that it's useless. Gemini is extremely generous - never hits a limit for me despite being used all day.

A couple of days ago I was comparing Claude vs Gemini asking both what the size of YACC generated parsing tables for ANSI C was. Claude was very gung-ho and rushed off to download a C grammar, install bison, and find out for itself (not really necessary), and then hit daily free usage limit half way through without even getting to an answer (despite this being the only thing I'd asked it that day).

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