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Comments (288)

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  stonewhite
  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 incredibly abysmal setup process, and if I want to limit spending per-user I have to create projects per user. The fact that you cannot activate Anthropic models on it if the billing still has free credits is almost a joke.I was a big proponent of Google and Gemini, but they left us reeling with their abrupt product decisions. Forced us to buy $200 subscriptions directly from Anthropic/OpenAI.
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  postalcoder
  I wonder how big the Pro model is that Google is using behind the scenes to train these smaller ones.Going on baseless speculation, the lack of accompanying pro models with these flash releases either means: 1) the model is too big to be economical, 2) google doesn't have the compute to serve the big model, 3) their big model has too many alignment issues to serve to the public.edit: looks like benchmarks are up on https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-3-6-flash. It's solidly middle-of-pack. However, if you want to be most fair to flash, look at the intelligence vs time per task and intelligence vs outputspeed benchmarks. This is a very fast model.edit 2: I use antigravity from time to time and in my experience, 3.5 flash is an underrated model, so long as you know what it's good for. It's very good at frontend (much better than gpt 5.5) and it's fast, so it's a great tool for iteration. I expect 3.6 to be no different.
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  swe_dima
  It's scary relying on Google's models.I have a very price sensitive workload that used to run on flash 2.5 lite - it's deprecated now.The replacement 3.1 flash lite is a lot more expensive, but now also has a sunset date.3.5 flash lite is even more expensive.So the price is rising and you have no choice but to keep paying more and more.
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  m_w_
  It's a bit disheartening to see no comparison to other models here - and I'm not sure this pushes the curve anywhere. 3.6 flash is more expensive than GLM 5.2 - but seemingly worse, although this post is really light (lite?) on details.It seemed for a time that Google had finally gotten the ball rolling, but I'm doubting that more and more as time passes. We'll see what happens with 3.5 pro I suppose.
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  simonw
  Pelicans for 3.6 Flash and 3.5 Flash-Lite (Cyber isn't available to me through the API yet.)https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...
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  primaprashant
  Pricing per million input/output tokens:2.5 Flash: $0.3 / $2.53.0 Flash: $0.5 / $33.5 Flash: $1.5 / $93.6 Flash: $1.5 / $7.5---2.5 Flash-Lite: $0.1 / $0.43.1 Flash-Lite: $0.25 / $1.53.5 Flash-Lite: $0.3 / $2.5
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  primaprashant
  A couple tidbits:> Beyond today’s releases, Gemini 3.5 Pro is currently testing with partners and we plan to make it broadly available as soon as it’s ready.> We have started our most ambitious pre-training run yet, for Gemini 4, and are excited by the progress.
• ianberdin
  Pelican svg and a near-perfect 3D MacBook at max effort for $0.16, about a fifth of Fable's price.Fable 5 still wins on detail with no visible errors, but it's close. And this isn't a memorized pelican;https://playcode.io/blog/macbook-svg-benchmark#gemini-3-6-fl...
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  b473a
  No word about updating Jules, which is still stuck on 3.1 Pro. I get that it's probably niche but I've really appreciated basically being able to give directions to Jules on my phone, then reviewing and merging a GitHub PR fifteen minutes later. It's been great for getting some progress in on a few personal projects during my commute when I can't exactly pull out my laptop.Anyone have any good alternatives?
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  jgbuddy
  It is both less intelligent and more expensive than GLM-5.2, while being closed weight.
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  doctoboggan
  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.
• goldenarm
  LLM reception is truly extreme, even worse than AAA game releases.Ever frontier lab lived it at least once : missing the frontier by a few months triggers extremly negative reactions, then you take back the lead for 2 weeks, and the hype cycle repeats.
• WarmWash
  The mention of an "ambitious" gemini 4 pre-train signals to me that 3.5 pro is probably a lost cause.That being said, it seems that Gemini is still the best image analysis model, so hopefully 3.6 flash builds on this even more.
• u1hcw9nx
  Google has not changed. Following two facts are like tautologies by now.1. Their AI efforts are very fundamental research oriented. They are really good at it.2. Their productization sucks. The end products gets little attention compared to competition. It can be canceled at any time. You should never build anything around Google only APIs, AI or not.
• dankai
  Unfortunately says more about how competitive 3.5 pro would be today at the frontier if they forgo it for 3.6 flash.
• youssefarizk
  3.5-lite is the real showpiece here; agentic models of this size are a huge value-add for 90% of knowledge work agent tasks
• Arshad-Talpur
  never tried gemini for coding, but this news seems to be compelling, i would definitely give it a try
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  ConfusedDog
  Why would 3.6 flash perform a little worse than 3.5 flash on Artificial Analysis Coding Index...https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-3-6-flash?intell...
• MILP
  I'm a big fan of the Flash-Lite models. They're exceedingly fast and deliver great outputs for high volume use cases where you need to process requests at scale. Can't wait to try the newer version.
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  spyckie2
  Google seems to have anorexia when it comes to model intelligence. They have an internal hard constraint on price per token it seems, and they are trying to squeeze out intelligence with limited compute.I wonder if there is something with their TPU cycles that makes them want to postpone training a new model. My guess is that they have been on the same base model for 6 months and they may have waited for the next gen TPUs to train Gemini 4, which greatly limits how much intelligence they can increase and forces them to do cost efficiency increases.
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  thevinter
  I struggle to see any value in this when DeepSeek is still a thing.
• revolvingthrow
  Tons of guardrails, lazy model, super confusing plans, expensive 3.5/3.6 flash and lite and 3.5 pro MiA?Rough patch for google ai
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  singingtoday
  I'm more excited for 3.5 pro. Gemini has fallen behind in some areas, but is still one of the best multimodal models.Has anybody found any models better at image or audio analysis?
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  JeremyHerrman
  Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite has been my go to for cheap document processing at scale (especially with 50% off batch mode), but they are really boiling the frog with pricing increases with each version:gemini-2.5-flash-lite: $0.10 input / $0.40 outputgemini-3.1-flash-lite: $0.25 input / $1.50 outputgemini-3.5-flash-lite: $0.30 input / $2.50 output (a 6.25x increase over 2.5!)Now watch them deprecate Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite in the coming months...
• sagex
  Don't know why are they even pursuing Gemini. Just download the Kimi, call it Kimini and serve it on your GPU. Maybe then train next architecture based on this!
• vinhnx
  For anyone wanting a faster overview: I ran the Gemini 3.6 Flash and 3.5 series release notes through NotebookLM and generated a short video summary. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUFBhvQ2tY4
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  mythz
  Always happy to see new Gemini releases as IMO Antigravity Pro 16.67/mo plan (Annual) is still the best plan available and have been pretty happy with Antigravity IDE.If it wasn't for Gemini/Antigravity I'd have to go with a Max Claude plan, as it stands now I can get by with just a Claude Pro plan to get Opus when I need it, whilst using Antigravity as my day-to-day workhorse.Unfortunately Gemini Flash became too expensive to use as a general purpose model (i.e. for AI features in Apps), luckily there are plenty of cheaper Chinese models to fill that gap now.
• nsbk
  It is 17% more token-efficient than 3.5 and performs significantly better in coding and tool usage benchmarks.It is also cheaper than 3.5:> This enhanced efficiency is also combined with a lower price than 3.5 Flash. At $1.50/1M input tokens and $7.50/1M output tokens, 3.6 Flash reduces the overall cost per agentic task, making agents more cost-effective to build and run.
• speak_plainly
  It feels like AI is going to be the end of Google. The post-Schmidt company culture cannot produce consistent, consumer-friendly products that any sane person would want to use consistently.
• summerlight
  Looks like 3.6 Flash is the first model with their newest pretraining run (cutoff date is 2026/03), long after 2.5 series.
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  thebigspacefuck
  IMO Gemini has the best free tier models/app for everyday use. Muse-Spark is perhaps just slightly better, but has none of the connectivity to my GApps (for things like “create a recipe in my Google Docs from this image”).Plus they are probably running these things on every Google search so saving tokens is a huge win for them.
• parsimo2010
  Feels like they released this to ride the wave of press of GPT-5.6, Kimi K3, and Qwen 3.8. Doesn't feel like Google has much substance with this post except a bump in version and tweaked their pricing.
• velominati
  Wow - Google does not even bother to show benchmarks of these models compared to the frontier and Chinese labs - only against previous versions. I'm not surprised. Having worked there for years it was amazing just how inwardly looking the company is.
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  Havoc
  Flash Lite: 0.3/m and 2.5/mDeepseek Pro: 0.435/m 0.87/mThat's wildly ambitious pricing by Google. You can maybe get away with spicy pricing at the SOTA edge but at the lower tiers everything is a lot more price sensitive.
• lambda
  3.6 Flash scores exactly the same as 3.5 Flash on the Artificial Analysis index. Better on some tasks, worse on others. Mostly within what I'd consider the noise window. Looks pretty much indistinguishable from 3.5 Flash, at least on these benchmarks: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-3-6-flash
• imagetic
  If only I could use Pi.
• vlad_recomply
  Models are expensive and low performance. On top of that they make you jump through hoops to even use these models without being throttled even for the weaker models. The only reason we are using them is credits. As soon as credits run out we are switching immediately.
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  kilroy123
  I deeply wish Google would focus on models like Gemma. Small, powerful, open-weight models you can run on phones or regular computer hardware.
• AussieWog93
  A lot of disappointment here in the comments, but models like these aren't meant to compete with the likes of Fable or GPT 5.6.I use 3.1 Flash Lite regularly to classify listings on eCommerce websites. It's great for this task - fast, cheap and accurate.In fact, it was the single best model we tried in terms of the speed vs accuracy vs price tradeoffs - including the Chinese models.Of course, 3.5 Flash was more accurate but the 5x cost increase couldn't be justified.3.5 Flash Lite sounds like it could be a strict upgrade for our use case, without a significant increase in costs or drop in speed.It's not GPT-6 but it's not trying to be. It's a completely different tool and great at what it does.
• xnx
  Proof-of-life release while they figure out how to have a competitive frontier model release. My hunch is they pushed too far in the "omni" model direction, that they made something so ungainly, it wasn't as good for normal tasks.
• ComputerGuru
  So 3.6 Flash is a somewhat of an admission that Google miscalculated by charging 3-5x for 3.5 Flash what it did for 3.0 Flash (3x input and output costs plus large token inefficiency changes) despite only modest improvements?3.5 Flash Lite is only a hair cheaper than 3.0 Flash, but I think 3.0 Flash is a massively more capable model?
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  XCSme
  I was expecting 3.6 Pro. It's been so long since the last Pro model...
• lukewarm707
  "The model will be exclusively available to governments and trusted partners via CodeMender soon as part of a limited-access pilot program"we are stealing plutocracy from the jaws of emancipation.i don't want to live in a world where abundance is guarded and shared among politicians and cronies, whilst the rest are left to rot.
• dvduval
  It does seem like their releases are getting closer together. I get the feeling they realized they were trying to roll out to their entire ecosystem and now they’re focusing more just directly on the AI model itself. I think give it a little time and they’ll start to be one of the competitors too.
• spstoyanov
  Glad to see the price is going down but it's still too high for a "fast" model
• TheAtomic
  I have liked using their consumer products but they don't make it easy, that's for sure.
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  dumberquestions
  "..and in some benchmarks like DeepSWE by Datacurve, we observe up to 65%, all at a lower cost per output token.""3.6 Flash delivers higher precision with fewer unwanted code edits and reduced execution loops, as seen in DeepSWE (49% vs. 37%)"So which one is it? 65% or 49%?
• Gecko4072
  I read this as a soft let down to not expect too much from 3.5 Pro.> We have started our most ambitious pre-training run yet, for Gemini 4, and are excited by the progress.
• anon
  undefined
• luciana1u
  the real product is the naming confusion we made along the way. Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, 3.5 Flash Cyber — at this point even the model cards need a model to explain them
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  pietz
  Are they comparing 3.6 Flash to 5.6 Luna and losing? That's ruff.
• maxdo
  quite a good model, the speed/price/quality ration is a new golden intersection for me, not sure if its as good as grok 4.5 but quite fast/capable model.
• game_the0ry
  At this point, I think google should consider becoming a hyper scaler for anthropic and open ai, and I predict that that is exactly what they do. The model is no longer the most valuable part of the stack.
• yanis_t
  The benchmarks are not particularly impressive. I suppose they needed to release something since the long pause. But not clear why would I use it now.
• metahost
  So about the same “intelligence” as Muse Spark 1.1 but 2x faster and about 2x as expensive.
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  catigula
  "We made 3.6/4 Pro, but it sucks, so this is the distilled model" vibes.
• gabriel-uribe
  Haven't been excited for a Gemini release since December. Wild to see.
• baalimago
  Not good enough for high-end, not cheap enough to be for low-end. Next!
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  mfkrause
  Pretty underwhelming, as expected honestly. I don't want to know what morale is like at DeepMind right now.
• sreekanth850
  Google is walking backwards, with such a pile of cash in pocket, i feel they are doomed.
• 5701652400
  if only DeepSeeek supported vision, would never use Gemini.
• ansuman441
  Specific to task these can be huge plus point.
• fuomag9
  no actual cyber model release, useless
• XCSme
  tl;dr: 3.6 flash is a bit smarter than 3.5 flash, but also a bit more expensive.My results [0] put Gemini 3.6 Flash at the top.3.6 Flash high has same $1.5 input price as 3.5 Flash, but output is cheaper from $9.0 to $7.5.Google said 3.6 Flash is more token efficient, but in my tests it's actually LESS token efficient[1] than 3.5 Flash, so despite the output price reduction, it still costs more.[0]: https://aibenchy.com/compare/google-gemini-3-6-flash-medium/...[1]: https://aibenchy.com/compare/google-gemini-3-6-flash-high/go...
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  canergl
  2 red flags1- no comparison with gemini 3.1 pro2- no comparison with any other model
• ilreb
  dupe? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48993130
• theplumber
  I think it’s safe to say Google seems a bit out of the top AI competition now. The “cyber” stuff also starts to become laughable with open models providing the full power without the crap Anthropic, Google, OpenAI are trying to frontload on you(I.e you are not allowed to develop/review a login system, pay a special cyber operation team to do it for you). They really deserve to become irrelevant in the future of AI.
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  m4tthumphrey
  I'm going to get downvoted/flagged but I feel like we need a new type of "Show HN/Tell HN" etc for "New AI Model Available".Front page is tedious these days.
• dakolli
  I use 3.5 flash 10x more than any other model, despite have access to all of them. If I'm going to play a slot machine, I'd rather get the pain over with quickly.
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  WhitneyLand
  The silence is deafening.Google watches over the last few months a flat out assault on the Pareto curve from American and Chinese companies. Release after release pushing the boundaries of frontier intelligence and price/performance.And the response from arguably the biggest AI research labs in the world by headcount is Flash 3.6.What do you do when you are given essentially unlimited resources and still find yourself falling behind?
• metalliqaz
  Other discussion from a few minutes earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48993130
• onlyrealcuzzo
  Gemini 3.5 flash is already a pretty good model. But, unfortunately, the primary way you can interact with it for coding is through Antigravity - which is actively developer hostile.It doesn't matter how good the model is if you're (mostly) forced to use it in Antigravity - which turns any model into crap.Wake me up when Antigravity doesn't suck.
• QuesnayJr
  I remember back when Gemini looked like it was the best model that this comment section was full of confident predictions that Google had "won" and that no one would ever catch up with them again. The most embarassing part is that I kinda believed them.
• lenerdenator
  We're almost five years into the whole GenAI thing and we're still relying on these guys to spoonfeed us incremental updates.It's time for them to start focusing on open-weight models and efficiency. Otherwise there's just a layer of marketing hype and "will it do this?" that has to be cut through for evaluation of each and every release cycle.Models are getting easier and easier to create. The money, if there's any here, is in the harness the user interfaces with, and the data centers running them.
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  zuzululu
  Google seems to be falling way behind the pack. antigravity cli is pure trash. gpt 3.5 pro is now behind and isn't released yet. GPT 6 and Fable 6 releasing next month. What the hell is going on over there ?
• ece
  Just switched to AI Plus from Pro, seems like I won't be missing much.
• zb3
  > we have taken an intentional approach to deploying 3.5 Flash Cyber. The model will be exclusively available to governments and trusted partnersScrew your government! US and Israeli governments should get the least access, but of course we all know they'll be the (only) ones to get full unfiltered access.
• tiahura
  3.5 Pro must really suck.
• holistio
  They are comparing against their own previous models instead of competitors. Not a great sign.
• geooff_
  At this point just put the Pareto in the bag bruh
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  raffael_de
  is it just me or is this one-upping each other every few days getting ridiculous secreting a whiff of desperation?
• ewaewaewa
  jew
• ChrisArchitect
  Some more discussion:Gemini 3.6 Flash https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48993130
• accountrequired
  whatever, dude. give gemma5
• dismalaf
  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 of using far fewer tokens and wasting my time. Fable is the only model that's come close to Gemini Pro for me.And as this is about Flash, it's exciting, I find Flash can usually get the right answer pretty quickly and without too much nonsense.
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  llmslave
  I keep saying this and people dont believe me, but I have b2b saas systems with actual agents running around the clock, and the performance/stability of the flash model is higher than most other models.Meaning, its predictable with tool calls, wont spin off a million tools/do weird behavior, its reasonable. Even sonnet in a real world decision making scenario is not reliable, or will reason so long its incredibly expensive.The benchmarks arent catching all the value, and most people have never actually ran an ai agent in a real context that matters
• fur-tea-laser
  not a google fanboy by any stretch... though i've been thrilled with the flash line of models... i exclusively use it on high, and have found it to be a great fit for increasing productivity 10-fold while maintaining quality... sure it can't just go off and one-shot a bunch of work, but at the complexity level i tend to work at, neither can the frontier in a robust way that i can be confident in... sure i have to be in the loop more, but that helps keep me grounded and course-correct earlier before wasting tokens... and when you sufficiently spec out a coding/software problem, and i mean really document all of the critical nuance, it will successfully satisfy the constraints... the quality is rarely acceptable on first-pass, but it forces me to stay connected to the architecture more than i would be if using a frontier model... i've found this to be a happy middle-ground of productivity and awareness...
• GodelNumbering
  [dead]
• veloxxn
  [flagged]
• cbossman
  [flagged]
• CurbStomper
  [dead]
• npn
  tested the models on aistudio. despite that the knowledge cut off is march 2026 it still knows nothing about 2025!you can check by asking "list notable world events in 2025, only list unplanned" on aistudio. or you can ask for Charlie Kirk, it also does not know. I tried it multiple time to ensure that I didn't not get routed to older models!> but google has searchirrelevant, without deeper knowledge about cutting edge technologies or latest libraries, all of it suggestions are crap. even you ask it to search it will still use outdated keyword thus only getting outdated information.in other word, what a disaster!
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  kthinckley
  Google desperately needs to make some leadership changes within their Gemini team now that they've been surpassed by 3-5 open weight models and risk loosing frontier status all together in the near future.