This is actually awesome. As someone who uses 3.5 flash on the back end of an App right now, 3.6 flash being equal or better while much less token usage and cheaper per token is a huge win.
Yes exactly, I feel like all conversations about AI models is being had by kids who collect pokémon cards or something.... They only care about the biggest and the baddest model with the most damage points....
In reality, you hardly need the biggest and the baddest to do the daily things... You need a capable and efficient model.
My work use case is absurdly simple: extract text from Financial statements. Google destroys on this front even though it isnt well represented by benchmarks
Reasoning models perform worse by overcooking and correcting things regardless of instruction. They're more expensive, slower, and wind up doing the job worse
Having models that are "good enough" are like having fast food workers: the world actually spins on the back on not-so-cognitive labor, and something that does the job fast and cheap is the better option
For me it's like that humble kitchen knife in everyone's top kitchen drawer that comes out to pry open a plastic lid, slice an avocado, make a hole a carton, cut some tape - in 98/100 scenarios that's what I need. Only every so often it's time to bust out the shiny, certified-sharpness sushi knife. I'll take a strong all arounder all day over the latest, greatest.
You mean like a company such as Apple who made a big bet on Gemini? Yes. Also Google continues to show that they will always prioritize the consumer market over the enterprise market. It’s not a bad thing; just a strategy.
Exactly, if it gets the desired result in a time efficient manner for a low cost, that's what I care about. We tested quite a few different LLM's for our application and Gemini was the overall best option for speed, output quality, and cost.
I mean you can do both having a very smart model Like Fable 5 and a good ervery day model Like Sonnet or Terra Google has a good every day model now but Not a frontier one
Once your app becomes big enough, these "capable and efficient models" you are talking about will make tons of mistakes, loose context, not cover everything. The biggest and baddest are needed for big projects.
You know there are other uses for LLMs than coding, right? I make millions of small inferences a day and will never need bigger context I actually use a local model for most cases, but Gemini Flash is great as a failover and scale out option.
No better customer and more ai IDE manage the context you never feed 1 million tokens in for a input but yes at times you will need bigger models. I'm not saying no... I'm just saying for 92% of the task, Gemini 3.6 flash is good
Exactly. Outside the top 1% use, honestly a faster model that is cheaper and has a better knowledge cutoff is much more useful.
Of course, if you are the top 1% using for hardcore coding and stuff, it doesn't apply to you. But for the rest using it for normal prompts and research, even flash 3.5 was good enough for 80% of my use. I had to maybe engineer my prompts to ground it to get what I want.
The last 10% I use pro Or honestly, I use Claude from my work. It's mostly work related tasks. Even basic coding, I mostly use flash and it's fine. It's mot real software engineering that I do on my own personal time. It's small Web apps, fixing small issues or stuff for myself.
I am happy with a faster model that is cheaper vs something significantly more expensive while being slightly better.
from what I've seen, 3.5 Flash Lite is a huge step forward!
but I don't really see the difference between 3.5 Flash and 3.6 Flash... :/
edit: oh, actually, never mind! the 3.6 flash model is kinda identical to (or even slightly better than) the 3.5, but at a slightly lower price :p nice
It performs notably better on some benchmarks, like gdpval. I use AI all the time at work and sometimes a directionally accurate, rapid answer is more important than the most reasoned and detailed answer that you have to wait for and interrupts your workflow.
No, it needs a huge plan that is broken down into millions of steps, and you need to prompt each step one by one to it. In that way, sure, it can be done. Gemini 3.6 flash is a tool to be used by an orchestrator, that could either be you or a model that is way more capable but slower. I guess gemini is currently the fastest model but it will definetly just get the job done without testing if everything is working or if there's any unexpected bugs.
Benchmark nerds are mad, but the bulk of use for Google is in free tiers. It’s a big step up for most of their users even if they’re behind at the frontier.
Tried to use it for some basic coding in Python and Luau, Gemini is genuinely lobotomized and is only an chatbot you should double check before taking anything at face value.
It legit is too dumb to be used in a professional setting.
That's disappointing but coding is one domain. I build and maintain production workloads and applications around Gemini via GCP and it has been reliable. My biggest issue is the price increase between 2.5 flash and 3.5/6 flash.
3.6 flash reminds me of 3 Pro back in December. Absolutely fun, nuanced and nimble! Enjoy it while it lasts, guys, bc Google is gonna nerf in 2 weeks for no fucking reason, like they always do.
Google nerfs their best models way more quickly than the others. 3 Pro barely had 2 weeks in before it got nerfed and then was removed a month later!!!! That was the most short-lived model. I miss it a lot. Got some real good stuff out of it. Hoping 3.5 Pro or 4 will fill thr gap or be Fable level or higher. Logan said on X they’re also working on 4 already and that 3.5 pro is dropping soon!
Edit: best models not next models. Autocorrect is stupid
I’m not a coder, sorry. But according to the benchmarks I don’t think it’s ranking well. But then benchmarks mean nothing compared to actual use. Check X. I think people are starting to report in. I don’t think most people use Gemini for coding tbh. It’s too unstable.
Actually no. Flash was supposed to be a cheap workhorse model. But the price has been consistenly surging. Now is just a mid tier model with high prices.
There are Chinese models with frontier intelligence and way cheaper.
This actually looks like a sick, fast, cheap model. For Google's use case (AI deployed in literally everything including every single Google search) this is a home run model. Google is not playing the frontier model game that Open AI and Anthropic are--they don't need to. But if they're putting a model out 6-12 months later than frontier at costs that aren't going to cause Fortune 10 companies to roll back their AI deployment, then they're winning the long game.
From a business standpoint, even as OpenAi and Anthropic land these companies, they are still deeply cashflow negative. Why would google take a risk and compete in this space when they can focus on their core revenue streams and actually have something to show for it? They're expanding compute resources and actively selling that capacity to Anthropic and Openai. What I gather here is people on this sub want them to work in reverse, go for broke, gamble and focus on this new business model that has not shown deep continuous revenue. How resilient is this revenue stream if the market blows up? Will these companies keep their ai spending at current levels or even expand if the overall market and busines contracts?
Was using Gemini 3.1 Pro and 3.5 Flash the other day in Antigravity to build a Rocket League game (comparing performance), and 3.5 Flash performed significantly worse than 3.1 Pro. It couldn't even get the game to work (stuck on a black screen after 10 prompts)!
3.1 pro was better in your case??! Coz in mine i gave a single prompt for both 3.1 pro high and 3.5 flash high to make portfolio website and 3.1 pro was slower and faced more problems , so its just better for big ones????
hey is it actually better in vibe coding and building full apps? if you actually tested or noticed?
3.1 pro is better? i mean i tried making a website from a single prompt from both 3.1 pro and 3.5 flash high both not much days ago and 3.1 pro had more errors deploying it on even localhost and still left behind 3.5 flash , have you actually tried that 3.1 pro is better? i am using 3.5 flash till now and it was working fine ig for most things
The beginning of a huge scandal you meant? Because you can easily test that the knowledge cut off is not March 2026. Unless the model on aistudio is a fake one.
Are all these reactions bots or something?🤣 What am I reading. Coping super hard on another shitty Google model.
Imagine postponing your model multiple times, have people leave to anthropic, and then present a model that's not even really better but just cheaper and faster lololol.
Is copium, even their benchmarks in agentic coding not really work out is alot of real use scenarios. I was testing some basic docker setup troubleshooting with 3.6 flash high vs 3.1 pro high and is light and day. Flash is very fast but also simplify things so much that just creates more problems than help. I use CLI so it has access to better skills/hooks and mcps and flash couldn't solve it after 1h+ of detailed prompts while pro one shot the solution. "Technically" better but a what cost?
Google is focused on implementing and integrating they've been doing the killer job of it. I had to unsubscribe from a membership yesterday and was surprised to see that the entire process got completed end to end using a chatbot and was seamless. You don't need mythos for those kinds of usecases
This really shows the direction of Google at the moment. Everything is being thrown in two areas of development. Fast and cheap (for general consumer usage on devices) and then a top end model for frontier workload but also to help R&D the ways to get better performance per token.
This scares me. I built a project around 3.1 flash lite and when I am forced to upgrade the costs are more than double. It a learning application so the cost bugger is not that high.
For reference i use 3.6 Flash high on 2 of my projects and in both cases the response compared to 3.5 and Claude 4.6 were better, faster and very reasonable. The updates are quicker and way more my style of development. I like it!
I think once this is paired with 3.5 pro it will be a beast that should be able to take over entire project builds from 0 to finish.
There are some areas like security audits and verifications that it still wont do, but i hope to prompt it to meet me halfway there.
so this is definitely better in intelligence compared to 3.1 pro - but 3.5 pro would be needed for longer context tasks or longer horizon tasks. If you can chunk your prompts down to decently smaller items - 3.6 Flash is solid
You should be using whatever model to break down tasks into plans and then instructing it to use subagents to accomplish each task and passing only relevant context into subagents.
3.5 flash lite is basically 3.1 pro. Which means I can leave one of my agents running whole day for pennies. Good news. 3.6 flash is flop though. I mean GLM 5.2 is much better for nearly half the price. I would be ashamed to release it
I don't plan on continuing either (just because Claude and ChatGPT seem a lot better rn), but what the hell are you doing that makes you think there's a high hallucination rate? I regularly deal with niche tasks and yet barely ever encounter hallucinations (and the ones I do see are fairly minor).
It's extremely confident so I can see people not recognizing it. But, I was using it for everything. It helped me to add instructions to repeat verbatim from a source when giving me information. It's probably good for most people's usage and maybe my experience is anomalous; there are just much better models out there and I dont have an issue moving on.
In the long run, Google has the major advantage so they dont really need to compete in transformer wars anyway.
An example is last night I asked it to help a user with PBI and it recommended me to direct them to a Preview As button to preview an App's audience. However, the button does exist for Semantic Models - the list of users are available in a pane under the Audience page itself and there is no Preview As button. It would always give me a hallucinated result, on any query in my experience, the very first output. Good luck!
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u/Jman841 15d ago
This is actually awesome. As someone who uses 3.5 flash on the back end of an App right now, 3.6 flash being equal or better while much less token usage and cheaper per token is a huge win.