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Comment by WarmWash | Hacker News Reader

The achilles heel of 3.8 flash is it's january 2025 knowledge cutoff date. Yes, almost 2 years ago.

I'm assuming that Argon has at least a June 2026 date, but man, the 3 series models were a mess with newer information.

While that's annoying, the other frontier models easily overcome this with appropriate tool usage. I do a lot of research with frontier models and they're very good about identifying where their parametric knowledge is insufficient and searching for the correct knowledge on the internet. 3.8 Flash is HORRIFIC. The majority of the time it doesn't use any tools and infers things from its parametric knowledge. Things which should clearly have implied tool calls. Historical statistics, legal precedent, economic data, etc. I think it's incredibly clear that it has been tuned for speed and not accuracy.

Of course, it's called "flash," and that implies its purpose. I have little use for speed and a LOT of use for accuracy, so I'm hopeful 4.0 is much better. I saw a benchmark earlier today showing that it is much less prone to hallucinations. Let's see.

Incorrect (to some degree)

> The knowledge cutoff date for Gemini 3.8 Flash is March 2026

https://deepmind.google/models/model-cards/gemini-3-8-flash/

>The knowledge cutoff date for Gemini 3.8 Flash is March 2026 – users can expect updated information for some domains while in others they may experience the model’s knowledge is limited to January 2025 (in line with the Gemini 3 Model Family). For more information about known limitations, see the Gemini 3.7 Flash

The "some domains" are very narrow. They likely just RL'ed popular queries.

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