The Flash model costs more than the Frontier models. Didn't see that coming.
Gemini 3.5 Flash
521–530 of 692 posts
Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash
#522For those who would like to know the total and active parameter count of this model: even though Google doesn't disclose the model technicals, we can infer them within relatively tight margins based on what we do know. We know they serve the model on TPU 8i, which we have plenty of hard specs for (so we know the key constraints: total memory and bandwidth and compute flops). We can also set a ceiling on the compute c…
If this is accurate it raises the question: why is this model so expensive? DeepSeek v4 Flash is 284B total/13B active, FP4/FP8 mixed, and only costs $0.14/$0.28 - even less from OpenRouter. Of course Gemini 3.5 Flash is most likely a better product, and therefore it can command a higher price from an economics perspective, but does this imply Google is taking roughly a 90% profit margin on inference? If so they're e…
This is the reality of the premiums available from being in the lead by ~8 months on model building technicals.
Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash
#523Earlier 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.
If you don't need SOTA or near SOTA there are plenty of dirt cheap models, just look at Gemma 4 31B on Openrouter.
You mean Kimi or qwen
Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash
#524I have google ai pro plan and tried antigravity with 3.5 flash but it used up all my quota in two prompts. If that is not a bug then it is seriously unusable.
The web version went from 100 Pro Prompts per day to...12 per 5 hours lol. I just did 3 back and forth not even technical planning for an infra project and I am ~25% thorough. Insane.
Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash
#525Per 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
Gemini 2.5 flash was the best Gemini model. Not the most intelligent but perfect balance of cheap, fast and not-too-dumb.
The 09-2025 preview was awesome.
Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
These companies are unprofitable (as all companies at this stage and ambition should be) but I increasingly don't see any justification for the idea that it is fundamentally unprofitable. Inference alone is certainly profitable. I'm running models at home that are comparable to performance of paid models a year or so ago for free. Even for much larger models the cost around inference serving are clearly manageable. T…
And if you can run those strong models at home for free, why would hosting them be a successful business for any of these providers? Profitable maybe, in terms of having low costs, but why pay Google or whoever when you can do it yourself for cheaper/"free"?
For free == with a huge upfront cost of getting a good enough box and running costs of maintaining it and just keeping it powered. By the time it pays off the frontier labs are three generations ahead at least.
Compare with on-demand billing per token and it just doesn’t make sense to own the hardware if you aren’t using it productively or renting it out for 95% of the time.
Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash
#527Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash
#528Per 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
I use Gemini for heavy web scraping-adjacent API work. Web grounding has been super useful for the project.
I will definitely not be updating to this new model, and I think once 2.5 Flash is deprecated I'll have to re-architect so Gemini is only used for web grounding requests. This is an insane price increase.
Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash
#529Per 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
To me this is almost like a tone-deaf naming change. Empty Slot (new Pro as Mythos competitor?) Old Pro -> now Flash Old Flash -> now Flash Lite Old Flash Lite -> now Gemma (and not served by Google) I say "almost" because the situation is more fluid and unstable than a normal naming change. If Apple were to do this with laptops, maybe it'd be like, Air gets better and pricier and becomes Pro-level model, Neo same wa…
Demis is on record saying they need small models on edge devices and if it’s on the edge the weights may as well be public officially.
Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash
#530For those who would like to know the total and active parameter count of this model: even though Google doesn't disclose the model technicals, we can infer them within relatively tight margins based on what we do know. We know they serve the model on TPU 8i, which we have plenty of hard specs for (so we know the key constraints: total memory and bandwidth and compute flops). We can also set a ceiling on the compute c…
Nice post! You piqued my curiosity, so after a bit of research it turns out that, with techniques like MTP/MLA/CSA, it's quite probable that these models are much more efficient (and maybe bigger? tho 400B sounds about right) than a simple RAM breakdown would suggest.
MTP - https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-...
MLA - https://machinelearningmastery.com/a-gentle-introduction-to-...
CSA - https://deepseek.ai/blog/deepseek-v4-compressed-attention