This is genuinely a competitive model, considering it beats Claude Sonnet 5 on almost all benchmarks and is more than half its price. Seems like Google is back in the game, though not leading the frontier anymore.
It can regularly cost more than Fable, take longer, and deliver far far lower quality.
I'm much more interested how this compares to Luna - which on price is terribly - but at least on quality the benchmarks make this look competitive / usable.
If Google continues monthly Flash releases like Sundar said they would, and they continue to have this much of an improvement in cost/quality - then in a few months this could reasonably be very competitive with the best of the best.
It is not there yet, but at least it's super fast, I guess.
One word: Haiku
Although maybe that was competitive when released? I don't recall, but it's an expensive, outdated model now.
Less than half its price.
More than 50% discount.