alt Hacker NewsGemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber
Comments
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.
Pretty underwhelming, as expected honestly. I don't want to know what morale is like at DeepMind right now.
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.
Flash Lite: 0.3/m and 2.5/m
Deepseek Pro: 0.435/m 0.87/m
That'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.
"..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%?
I was expecting 3.6 Pro. It's been so long since the last Pro model...
Are they comparing 3.6 Flash to 5.6 Luna and losing? That's ruff.
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.
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.
Nice to see that it's cheaper than 3.5
"We made 3.6/4 Pro, but it sucks, so this is the distilled model" vibes.
I have liked using their consumer products but they don't make it easy, that's for sure.
Glad to see the price is going down but it's still too high for a "fast" model
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.
So about the same “intelligence” as Muse Spark 1.1 but 2x faster and about 2x as expensive.
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...
Google is walking backwards, with such a pile of cash in pocket, i feel they are doomed.
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.
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
Haven't been excited for a Gemini release since December. Wild to see.
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.
Not good enough for high-end, not cheap enough to be for low-end. Next!
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.
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.
I have no skin in this game and this comment will be gray in a few minutes BUT a friendly reminder that these types of threads are astroturfed heavily by competitor labs and any info should be taken with a massive grain of salt.
"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.
never tried gemini for coding, but this news seems to be compelling, i would definitely give it a try
no actual cyber model release, useless
Specific to task these can be huge plus point.
2 red flags
1- no comparison with gemini 3.1 pro
2- no comparison with any other model
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.
if only DeepSeeek supported vision, would never use Gemini.
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.
Plugged 3.5 Flash Lite into an existing agent harness that was previously using 3.1 Flash Lite and this shit just does not work. It's not following instructions and is not producing the correct tool calls.
Other discussion from a few minutes earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48993130
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?
Why exactly are they announcing these completely milquetoast models ?
I'd be low-keying the release if anything, given how lame they are compared to their competition.
What am I missing?
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
Just switched to AI Plus from Pro, seems like I won't be missing much.
> we have taken an intentional approach to deploying 3.5 Flash Cyber. The model will be exclusively available to governments and trusted partners
Screw 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.
3.5 Pro must really suck.
They are comparing against their own previous models instead of competitors. Not a great sign.
At this point just put the Pareto in the bag bruh
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?