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Comment by godbox | Hacker News Reader

What a snooze fest. Another model that does not meaningfully improve on intelligence or price compared to its peers. Google has basically announced that they've "caught up" with the rest. I think they've been doing great work in the Flash department so seeing this is... underwhelming?

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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.

I noticed this recently with the user submitted benchmarks on Kaggle. For these obscure tests that the models haven't seen, Gemini 3.8 is often on par or beating other frontier models. Gemini is a bit shite at the game checkers though, for some weird reason it performs poorly on those benchmarks.

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

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

That is a promotional price. The regular price is double that.

flash on ai studio is my fav model to chat with, by miles

It's half cost of gpt for same intelligence. Nearly 4x cheaper than claude.

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

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