> does not meaningfully improve on intelligence or price compared to its peers

$10 per million output tokens isn't improving on frontier price?

The only models beating it are on "max", while this is "high". There's no guarantee that those effort / reasoning levels compare, but there's almost certainly an "xhigh" or "max" version later which will score higher there.

I found that Google does not benchmaxx as much as the other providers. Of you look at real-case evaluation like lm-arena, even the 3.8 flash is often near the top despite its benchmark index being worse.

Based on some... rumors I've heard, this is their "Pro" offering. There is supposed to be an Ultra coming as well.