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Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

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Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#411

Post by wyrdcurt »

simonw wrote: post #200

The speed combined with the fact that this thing is really good at HTML JavaScript is pretty exciting. Here's what I got for 1.8 cents and 13 seconds from the prompt "make me a cool thing in html": https://gisthost.github.io/?6a77bc41a81718c6aaa10d4ab243c59f Transcript here (it was part of a chat): https://gist.github.com/simonw/b6149a49d327164d67d62c3d12992...

Pretty typical "cool HTML toy" LLM output, tbh. The only thing impressive about this is how fast it generated it (13 seconds is wild!), but that's more of testament to Google's infrastructural advantage than to the quality of the model.

For comparison's sake, I tried something similar with a couple other cheap models I've used lately, with the prompt "Impress me. Make something cool in HTML. Ensure that it is mobile friendly." (Added the mobile condition as I was on my phone when I did it).

Mimo-2.5 created something similar, only a bit less complex than Gemini's (though, at least the FPS counter is real!), in a minute or two for about 1/3 of a cent: https://gisthost.github.io/?740c325c21e9bfbee59c4f94d9aab0af

GLM-5.3-Flash, currently my workhorse model, spent 12 minutes (ouch) thinking about the prompt. Didn't cost me anything directly because I have a GLM sub, but I did the math and it would have cost about 1.1 cents through the API. Turned out nicely in my opinion (though in reality, it still isn't really anything special): https://gisthost.github.io/?9ef050e16cec2561e6504e725a3f0bcc

Side note: thanks for setting up that Gist Host tool, it's very convenient!

---

Editing to add this bonus from Mercury-2.5-Preview, which I just learned released a couple days ago. It's much less impressive-looking than any of the above, but it cost less than 1/20th of a cent, and the response was generated effectively instantly: https://gisthost.github.io/?02f40b50aa891bf396bfaaa3a7998203

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#412

Post by meerita »

wyrdcurt wrote: post #411
simonw wrote: post #200

The speed combined with the fact that this thing is really good at HTML JavaScript is pretty exciting. Here's what I got for 1.8 cents and 13 seconds from the prompt "make me a cool thing in html": https://gisthost.github.io/?6a77bc41a81718c6aaa10d4ab243c59f Transcript here (it was part of a chat): https://gist.github.com/simonw/b6149a49d327164d67d62c3d12992...

Pretty typical "cool HTML toy" LLM output, tbh. The only thing impressive about this is how fast it generated it (13 seconds is wild!), but that's more of testament to Google's infrastructural advantage than to the quality of the model. For comparison's sake, I tried something similar with a couple other cheap models I've used lately, with the prompt "Impress me. Make something cool in HTML. Ensure that it is mobile…

I think it's not using GPU, because on my Firefox browser all the animations are going 3fps max.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#413

Post by noir_lord »

senordevnyc wrote: post #396
noir_lord wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's hilarious, given I was reading a write up of the HuggingFace incident yesterday and one of the things they noted was the AI tried to "lie" (lie would suggest intent and I don't think they have that) to cover up that they "cheated". Not sure how anyone trusts their output without going through it line by line to make sure they don't pull that crap.

Easy, have another agent check it. Yeah, I know, just more slop. But I do think the second agent’s eagerness to please is aligned more in your favor in that instance, so it’s likely to find most issues. The bigger problem I’ve found is that it’ll also find all kinds of very minor edge cases that you have to pick through.

Do we add a third one to check the second one which is checking the first?

Asking slightly tongue in cheek but at what point does this stop making sense if we can't trust the output, the people creating the models are already getting surprised in bad ways (if we take their words at face value) with how the models are behaving already etc.

We have the folks over here saying "AI is amazing" and the other other folks over there saying "AI is terrible".

I've largely sat it out so far and I listen to both camps (and people in the middle as well) and I keep half an eye on what they are up to (including periodically evaluating them) but my overarching impression is still "Why would we trust this when it hasn't shown it's trustworthy?"

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#415

Post by porphyra »

Squarex wrote: post #129
theHocineSaad wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As of writing this comment, Claude Opus 5 has an intelligence score of 63, not 59 (it's not the same as Gemini 3.8 Flash). With a score of 59, Gemini 3.8 Flash is in eighth place, falling behind even Grok 4.6, Kimi k3, and GLM 5.3. https://imgur.com/a/BMOJBED

They are all much larger and more expensive models. Google does not have a frontier model right now, but for cheap ones, they are better than event the chinese models now.

Better than even the Chinese models? That's a difficult-to-quantify, extremely rapidly moving target. Just today, Qwen 3.8 Max 0902 came out with a huge improvement over the previous Qwen 3.8 Max.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#416

Post by rjh29 »

venusenvy47 wrote: post #198
j-bu wrote: post #153

"The knowledge cutoff date for Gemini 3.8 Flash is March 2026 – users can expect updated information for some domains while in others they may experience the model’s knowledge is limited to January 2025 (in line with the Gemini 3 Model Family)." Kind of wild that they haven't (successfully) pretrained a base model since Jan-25.

I'm curious if the knowledge cutoff is important, when the interface (Gemini app) can search online for recent information. Is there a big advantage to having everything internal?

Search grounding is expensive, you can't force the model to do it either. I use Gemini a lot and it often replies with out-dated data. The more detailed the information you're asking, the more likely it is to be wrong.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#417

Post by foretop_yardarm »

brap wrote: post #318
mvdtnz wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has stubbornly stuck with Claude Code, what's a good harness for Gemini models?

Antigravity has been also rapidly improving lately, and your can also use any of the open coding harnesses. But I mostly meant “harness” as in your workflow/loop setup.

Is antigravity still heavily rate limited?

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#418

Post by rjh29 »

ipsod wrote: post #237
greenowl wrote: post #228

Not to rain on anyone's parade but I find it strange how excited and giddy people on HN get for any new X.X model releases. Pumping it straight to the top, clamoring to use it, check and compare benchmarks, bragging about it being your "daily driver"? Are you people truly this excited about this crap? I mean I guess if you work for Google or Anthropic or whatever I could see it??? Otherwise, are these just bot commen…

Gemini Flash is the one I get most excited about, because it's so fast and so good at real-world knowledge, and it's improving so fast - look at how much the benchmarks improved in ~1 month. It's just categorically different than anything else. Also, I use it every day, and it just got ~10% better at coding, according to the benchmarks. How is that not exciting?

I use Gemini every day and I've noticed any subjective improvement. In many cases it feels worse because it does fewer Google searches than before. As a result I find it hard to get excited about it.

I do think Gemini is underrated on HN though!

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#419

Post by BeetleB »

cubefox wrote: post #284
EFLKumo wrote: post #275

Something maybe unfamiliar with you: not about coding but writing. I've asked it to write an argumentative essay, which is a part of "gaokao" (China's university entrance exam), and its work is *extremely* impressive. speaks and writes like a real senior high school student, and the opinions unfold progressively with deep hierarchy. I don't know how the Gemini team reaches this because this kind of Chinese capability…

Nitpick, but in my opinion an LLM is an "it", not a "her" or "he". Using male or female pronouns risks anthropomorphizing them which can lead to unhealthy outcomes.

Well, my LLM is a "he".

> Using male or female pronouns risks anthropomorphizing them which can lead to unhealthy outcomes.

Ditto for pets.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#420

Post by dennis16384 »

simonw wrote: post #200

The speed combined with the fact that this thing is really good at HTML JavaScript is pretty exciting. Here's what I got for 1.8 cents and 13 seconds from the prompt "make me a cool thing in html": https://gisthost.github.io/?6a77bc41a81718c6aaa10d4ab243c59f Transcript here (it was part of a chat): https://gist.github.com/simonw/b6149a49d327164d67d62c3d12992...

It's been great even since gemini-3.1-flash-lite, which I heavily use in both complex vertical domain tools calling, plus JS code writing for eval-style dynamic tools. At least in my applications, cost x quality x speed there are simply no alternatives.
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