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Gemini 3.5 Flash

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Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash

#551

Per 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…

> Old Flash Lite -> now Gemma (and not served by Google)

> which is now Gemma territory, and I can't get that served by Google anymore

Gemma is served by Google. They're serving Gemma 4 26B A4B at $0.15/$0.60.

https://console.cloud.google.com/agent-platform/publishers/g...

https://cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise-agent-platform/ge...

Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash

#552

Per 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 you look at the benchmark, the model is not particularly good at coding, and as you point out it costs 3x the price of the previous flash models. So what is the market for it?

I think that they might have reached the latency sweetspot where voice applications become more natural. Natural speech is <100 tokens per second (after STT), so $9 for a million token takes you to roughly 3 hours of speech. That's totally competitive compared to human costs.

Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash

#554
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 We might be locked into outdated knowledge, where only whitelisted sources decide what to include.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…

Considering all models can use search engines, is this really relevant?

Yes. Huge difference in quality in from-weights distilled knowledge vs something based on a search tool. If the LLM uses a search tool there's barely a difference between a 30B model and Opus or GPT 5.5, because it just bases its reply on the stuff that came up. Which is generally SEO junk.

Obviously with the last example I'm not talking about long-running agentic tasks here that involve many dozens of search calls (like the recent Erdos problem stuff).

And that doesn't even consider the extra content rot, the time it takes, the need for such an API and so on.

One of the biggest advantages Anthropic models have had over GPT was GPT's woefully outdated data cutoff. They finally improved on this with 5.5, but IIRC it took a year.

Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash

#555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not meant as an insult, but have you actually LLM/vibe coded anything that used a fast(-ish) moving library or framework? Try asking your favorite LLM with say Jan 2025 knowledge cutoff (or pretraining data cutoff, whatever you want to call it) to work on something using a framework that had a big rewrite later that year (which would make it one year old now, which is like ages in the LLM coding era)... It's…

> It's a nightmare full of wrestling with the LLM when you try to tell it the version of the framework and that it changed a lot from the previous version and yadda yadda Tip: Add a default instruction to look at the actial downloaded source code of the dependencies used (assuming you're not dealing with closed source dependencies). Have the agent treat it as your own (readonly) source code instead of relying on mode…

Great, now you experience context bloat 3x as quickly and any task takes 3x as long.

Ifz Google wants to structurally compete with Anthropic on coding, this issue is a must-fix. OpenAI finally fixed it with 5.5.

Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash

#556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until they prefer not to search. Let me explain using the example of the open-source security framework (1) our team is working on. If you ask Gemini what you should use to integrate fraud prevention or account takeover protection into your product, there will be no mention of our open-source project. Five years in development, 1.3k stars, over 140 pull requests — all this isn't enough to make it into the training da…

I just put the terribly generic query "what tools would you recommend to integrate fraud prevention or account takeover protection into my product" into both Claude (Sonnet) and Gemini (3.1 Pro) via the standard web interface and both took the first step of searching the web. That's consistent with my past experience -- the usual harnesses typically will search the web in cases where I might expect/want them to. Now…

> while neither model included your product in it's initial response, when I followed up with "what about open-source"

You just proved that LLMs don't know about the product (which is fine), but they don't even know the category exists.

It's like driving a car whose mirrors show a two-year-old reflection and insisting they work fine.

Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash

#557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might work if it wasn't for FOMO. Are you ok with only $20 of frontier usage a month?

Subjective, but if we compare to compute not everyone needs the most expensive laptops or super computers for their work. I think frontier models will be invaluable for scientific research, defense, financial analysis and such. But the average person probably would be reasonably well-served with a local model. If you're in sales, customer service, product management and such - the leading open models at the 30B mark…

I mean customer service maybe, but how much longer will humans even be doing that job at this point?

Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash

#558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like it embodies Google's vibe of an uncool guy trying to stay relevant to the youth pretty well.

That's grok. IMO both gemini and grok are the most overlooked models.

Gemini is absolute garbage for anything useful, the last good model they released was 2.5 pro.

Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash

#559
post #419
post #131

The 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...

We've been daily-driving this model for a few weeks and let me tell you, everything it does is a lot. Fast as fuck and it's actually not bad intelligence-wise for a fast model. It basically tries to make up for any intelligence deficit by just doing a lot, checking a lot, retrying a lot. That's not to say I don't spend my days raging at it... a lot... but it's not that bad. It does tend to ignore completion criteria…

One time I told it “we are doing science” and I had DNA emoji everywhere and it so over enthusiastically embraced the science theme I was genuinely laughing. It finished one task with a flourish of several dna emoji and proclaimed: The Science is COMPLETE. I died.

It really is a lot some of the time. And it’s chain of thought is hilarious a lot of the time.

Re: Gemini 3.5 Flash

#560
post #33

Is there a good benchmark tracking hallucinations? The models are all incredibly good now, even the open ones, and my hope is that the rate of hallucinations is something that's falling off in concert with larger and larger context lengths.

> While OpenAI originally pioneered Codex (which went on to power GitHub Copilot), Google’s direct answer for dedicated, native code completion and natural-language-to-code generation is CodeGemma. https://g.co/gemini/share/33e7a589a161

Nothing about this is a hallucination. The Codex that it talks about is real, existed, and did go on to power the original Copilot. You neither specified that you meant a different Codex, nor did it make anything up. The CodeGemma isn't made up either, as its referenced working link shows.
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