alt Hacker NewsGemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber
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It’s strange that its score on Terminal‑Bench 4.0 is so low. They aren’t fast enough to benchmaxx that section.
Is the Gemini CLI still terrible compared to Claude Code and Codex? The harness the main thing holding back Google models as they could've been the best given all the advantages in compute capacity and training data they initially had, where now even the Google CEO said they're falling behind in agentic tasks, which is sort of a vicious cycle because RLHF relies on human usage.
I’m interested in a general knowledge model (closed or open weight) and not coding specific. I want to plan for travel and trip. Do you have one of your favorite HN crowd?
Flash Cyber sounds like a villain from a 90s hacker movie and I'm here for it.
Am I the only only one thinking that Google might still "win" the AI race, despite the apparent gap?
They're apparently evolving slower than most SOTA models but "slow and steady wins the race" is probably still a thing.
And since Google doesn't depend exclusively on AI models, they can probably afford to "wait and see" where all this craze is heading.
From personal experience it feels much more capable than 3.7 Flash.
model card https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49537354 (doesn't 404)
disclaimer : Introductory price expires on December 31, 2026. Starting January 1, 2027, $1.50/1M input tokens and $7.50/1M output tokens will apply.
Google keeps flashing everyone where everyone is expecting to get PRO'bed.
I use Gemini to make sense of things Claude says to me.
The race to the bottom continues
I wish google to thrive
shows up in /models though and encourages you to use it over 3.7 Flash I prefer this over reading specs: the "just show me" way
Gemini 3.8 flash thinks Entoloma sinuatum is good to eat... Otherwise feels great
Nice surprise. In a few of my own tests it seems maybe a tad slower than 3.7 (but still way faster than any other LLM I've used) and even smarter. With 3.7 I felt I could just not use 3.1 Pro at all and 3.8 seems even better.
Could someone explain to me why it matters if google has the best model? Isnt the real metric cost per task?
I have to say:
The Google brand remains powerful on HN!
I’m shocked.
What did it say?
It's a shame Google crams it ham-fistedly into search results and that Google has some of the reputation it has because I actually really enjoy Gemini and I don't even use it for the reason people often list which is that you can cross-reference it to stuff in your Google account
I would really love to be able to use these Gemini models in Opencode or Pi with my existing Google AI Pro subscription.
3.8 uses nearly twice as many tokens as 3.7. One might be inclined to think that they just increased the thinking budgets...
3.7 used 64M on high: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-3-7-flash 3.8 used 120M on high: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-3-8-flash
Even their own chart showed more than 2x higher cost compared to 3.7: https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ima...
What is with Google's dumb ass STILL refusing to respect the OS dark mode setting in fucking 2027??
Whatever they’re using within the Maps app is not good at all. I cannot just ask it for things conversationally like I do with ChatGPT. They really need to put a better model in there. I don’t even think it maintains context across two different queries within the same session. It’s not seamless and doesn’t just “get it” like ChatGPT does.
Yesterday I asked for food stop on my road trip 45 minutes from the current time and it gave me some options, but then I changed my mind and specifically asked for Asian restaurants and it completely forgot about the 45 minutes and gave me the closest Asian restaurant to me.
>"safety performance" - this starting to get long in the tooth. Gemini cut programming session 3 times for "safety reasons" yesterday for mentioning image generation (I need to generate bunch of those for infinite zoom virtual training app experience). After I got creative and managed to trick it to answer t was of course because "think of a children"
And in my other app I was debugging and using OpenAI to optimize some path it cut me off numerous times because it did not like JIT functionality (this is my commercial business rule evaluation engine that compiles rules to executable code inside the app to increase performance using asmjit library)
I am basically paying for them to waste my tokens and time on these 2 tasks
love these flash models
not really getting the excitement over this, its at opus 5 medium level, and opus 5 is not really the go to model , claude purists hate it
so its fast sure and decent at non coding usage but for developers nothing can really top sol or fable.
even grok 4.6 is so so and i would not choose 3.8 flash over it.
The biggest problem with Gemini is that its performance degrades the longer you use it for coding. Is it just me?
"Page not found"...
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And yet again another failed launch from Google. I pay for their AI plus Google one package to get more cloud storage (have no interest in their AI bundle but you have to pay). and all I see in the Gemini app is 3.6-flash
I'm trying it now for token heavy coding tasks, it's capable for many tasks but in noway compares to Claude/Sol - requires more prompts and the output isn't as good.
So just another mid-tier flash model, nothing exciting, but Antigravity has very generous quotas so it's a good workhorse model when your Claude/OpenAI subs run out.
And whilst it's a fast model, having to baby sit through and approve prompts every few seconds ends up making it slower than the Auto approve modes of Claude/ChatGPT - they definitely need an auto approve mode.
Looks like Google's given up on frontier models for external consumption?
Gemini is getting less useful with each update. I could edit a pdf with the 3-pro model before but 3.1-pro couldn't edit the given pdf nor it could generate one for me.
One place where I find the Flash models surprisingly bad is Google Search's "AI Mode".
A recent example - I searched for how to unsubscribe from Pearson emails. Google Search "AI Mode" confidently gave me a sequence of steps along the lines of Settings > Profile > Email preferences > Unsubscribe.
Of course, I looked for an unsubscribe link before asking Google. None of those options existed. The correct answer was there is no way to unsubscribe through the account, so I just blockthe emails instead.
I've run into this pattern quite a few times. AI Mode seems to make up things all the time.
Not to rain on anyone's parade but I find it strange how excited and giddy people on HN get for any new X.X model releases. Pumping it straight to the top, clamoring to use it, check and compare benchmarks, bragging about it being your "daily driver"?
Are you people truly this excited about this crap? I mean I guess if you work for Google or Anthropic or whatever I could see it??? Otherwise, are these just bot comments?
I see benchmarks beating sol terra and sonnet. But is actually better? Has someone used it? I don't see actually much people that use Gemini for coding.