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Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber

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Re: Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber

#501

Post by zobzu »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #415
awongh wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like there are some credible rumors that Google is actually winning in terms of actually building models that work and don't lose money- between how they're able to price them, the TPU advantage and their capex advantage (being able to raise debt + just having a lot of cash - well I said not lose money... more like not go bankrupt). From the outside they look like they're behind in terms of frontier models,…

It's rumored that Gemini 3.5 flash has a >50% margin, and I'd imagine 3.6 flash is even higher. I do not think OpenAI or Anthropic are actively chasing margins - though, Anthropic is supposed to be profitable on some form of non-GAAP accounting... I suspect Google isn't really interested in seeing how far it can get dragged into a race of selling dollars for $0.25, and is more interested to see if it can stay in the…

google has to make money. flash is awesome. you can run it free on their infra and the performance and latency is excellent for what you wait and pay for right now, with great perf per watt. every person in the world going to google.com runs it. every query. its far larger than free gpt, localhost qween and what not.

it's their pro that isn't awesome at all. in fact, their pro kinda suck now that everyone else woke up.

Re: Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber

#502

Post by zobzu »

anthonypasq wrote: post #433
deltaqueue wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That "TPU advantage" might be slowing Google down (though likely not as much as their internal bureaucracy). Porting CUDA-based research, debugging, and overall experimentation speed is likely slower. The GPU is still king for training.

lmao, you know all Anthropic models are trained on TPU right?

thats funny because my company sells them nvidia gpu for training. but im happy for the billions, they prolly use them for counterstrike!

Re: Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber

#503

Post by janalsncm »

chrsw wrote: post #425
maxloh wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally doubt that. It would be a shame if they cannot beat Kimi K3 or Qwen3.8 Max, both of which are claimed to be Fable-like. If that is true, it will be [or would be] the first time a major American lab falls behind a Chinese competitor.

Google can't compete with China, neither can Meta. Only two labs in the US can keep chucking billions at the frontier race. Everyone else has a real business to run. China can keep up because it's cheaper to run a frontier lab there. They also have more researchers and a stronger cultural inclination for this sort of thing. And I guess the business case in China doesn't have to work as well as it does in the US.

> China can keep up because it's cheaper to run a frontier lab there

Not sure if this is what you meant, but their training runs are significantly cheaper. This was one of the big shockers from the Deepseek R1 paper. US foreign policy has helped to ensure that the Chinese are compute constrained, so they literally cannot buy the most expensive and powerful training rigs.

This has led to a steady drumbeat of innovations which are not revolutionary on their own but stack together to make things much more efficient.

Re: Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber

#504

Post by dinkelberg »

cube00 wrote: post #283
doctoboggan wrote: post #22

I have a side business selling custom fingerprint jewelry and I use gemini nano banana to clean up customer submitted fingerprint images. This was a step I used to do by hand at 10 - 15 minutes per image and nano banana is the first model that is able to do the task (it is astonishingly good at it). I can't wait to see what the next nano banana can do, hopefully its released soon.

Are your customers clearly informed that you're sending their immutable fingerprints to an AI service?

Their shop is linked to in the bio. They don't seem to have a privacy policy up on the site. When in the checkout form it links to the generic Shopify privacy policy. No hints to the fact that uploaded images are processed by third parties, as far as I can tell. That should be corrected for sure.

Re: Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber

#505

Post by dudeinhawaii »

dismalaf wrote: post #93

With all the naysayers on Gemini models I'm curious how many people actually use Gemini regularly? For me, Gemini models are the most usable. Claude Opus and Mistral always try to turn queries into one-shot enormous commits, which just burns tokens, time and annoys me for something which is still wrong more often than not. Gemini seems far better at listening to instructions and giving me what I actually want, on top…

I use all of the major providers daily and I tend to go to Gemini for "fast lookups" where a good enough answer is probably OK. I use ChatGPT and Claude for anything where it matters and generally when I invoke all three -- Gemini is the most surface level with responses, and also sycophantic.

It gets worse from there. Gemini is terrible at agentic coding, primarily because Agy is terrible. I noticed Google updated Agy with this release, so perhaps that's finally going in a good direction. I'll have to test it. Thus far, my experience in countless experiments has been Gemini models being 2x faster yet with less depth in their solutions and a lot more going off track.

I very rarely have to stop Codex or Claude Code sessions because they're doing something random and unexpected (or not asked for). I genuinely think Gemini models are brilliant but virtually useless in agentic scenarios in my experience of the last few years (2.5, 3, 3.1, 3.5).

I should also note that Gemini web UI annoying resets to its lowest intelligence which feels scummy and Google is not transparent about what "extended thinking" really is. Past posts have pointed to "extended" being medium. Every other provider gives you the raw value (medium/high/etc).

So honestly, I feel Google would rather I don't use their models. They just want to get a little bit of mindshare and stay in the conversation. I had the Ultra plan and cancelled it once it was apparent they were not improving the agentic experience nor trying to compete.

Re: Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber

#506

Post by s3p »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #466

It's kind of ridiculous how good these are getting. 3.5 Flash lite is pretty comparable to Opus 4.8 (at least for the couple tests I did) while simultaneously being 6x faster and 19x cheaper. https://fy2zp1ri90.evvl.io/

Not for me personally. While setting up a custom website, 3.5 Flash introduced tons of bugs that Claude had to fix. The website has about 3,000 lines of code spread across multiple files, and Gemini somehow couldn't do frontend changes without breaking things. Sharing my 2c, but I've stayed on GPT 5.5+ and Claude Sonnet/Opus 4.6+. Anything past that from those two have been bug-free, but Google's latest hasn't been.

Re: Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber

#507

Post by weird-eye-issue »

Andrex wrote: post #454
culi wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's Knowledge Graph is a massive advantage no other competitor has. I don't think they've fully utilized its full potential but I don't know if any other company could've built something like Scholar Labs

Knowledge Graph + automated transcriptions of almost every YouTube video = giant untapped moat of data

It's not exactly untapped, my AI company has scraped YouTube transcripts for 3 years now for RAG

Re: Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber

#508

Post by HDBaseT »

poisonborz wrote: post #345
cube00 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are your customers clearly informed that you're sending their immutable fingerprints to an AI service?

Yes this is extremely unresponsible if so. Fingerprints are legally protected biometric data in most juristictions.

It is not mentioned in their FAQ. [0].

[0] https://lulimjewelry.com/pages/faq

Re: Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber

#509

Post by HDBaseT »

zwaps wrote: post #442

Here's the issue: GLM 5.2 is better, also cheaper, and almost as fast. So essentially, a big L for Google. Combine this with them not being able to produce a frontier model this generation... hmm implications

Counter-point, cost per task is almost the same ($0.47 vs $0.50) between GLM 5.2 and Gemini 3.6 Flash. [0] Not to mention the subscription plans likely produce 10x value compared to GLM 5.2 API, unsure the rate limits on a equal subscription vs subscription, but Google subscriptions offer tons of other value, including 1 year of Free Gemini for Education accounts.

[1] https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-3-6-flash

Re: Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber

#510

Post by zmmmmm »

repeekad wrote: post #180
stonewhite wrote: post #90

Google somehow managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of success with their AI products. They literally forced me and my company out of Antigravity by phasing out AI Ultra subscription without any proper product follow-up. Antigravity IDE cannot even have poweruser subscriptions now from Google Workspace an Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform cannot be attached to Antigravity IDE. Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform has an…

Aren’t the subscriptions extremely subsidized and burning cash for Anthropic and OpenAI? A reasonable explanation is they’re simply abstaining from the war of attrition, especially given cheaper comparable models are breaking the illusion that the “frontier of intelligence” has any kind of per token margin.

I think the subscriptions pay them back in spades because the same dev who maxes out their subscription on their personal account transfers that exact behaviour over to their enterprise work and - guess what - it's all billed per token there. This is a large reason why corporates are reeling from the cost right now, I think.
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