Wow - Google does not even bother to show benchmarks of these models compared to the frontier and Chinese labs - only against previous versions. I'm not surprised. Having worked there for years it was amazing just how inwardly looking the company is.
It does seem like their releases are getting closer together. I get the feeling they realized they were trying to roll out to their entire ecosystem and now they’re focusing more just directly on the AI model itself. I think give it a little time and they’ll start to be one of the competitors too.
tested the models on aistudio. despite that the knowledge cut off is march 2026 it still knows nothing about 2025!
you can check by asking "list notable world events in 2025, only list unplanned" on aistudio. or you can ask for Charlie Kirk, it also does not know. I tried it multiple time to ensure that I didn't not get routed to older models!
> but google has search
irrelevant, without deeper knowledge about cutting edge technologies or latest libraries, all of it suggestions are crap. even you ask it to search it will still use outdated keyword thus only getting outdated information.
update: the knowledge cut off date is "unknown" now.
funny because some people downvoted me believed that there is no relation between knowledge cut off date and real world events. that's not how it works!
It is 17% more token-efficient than 3.5 and performs significantly better in coding and tool usage benchmarks.
It is also cheaper than 3.5:
> This enhanced efficiency is also combined with a lower price than 3.5 Flash. At $1.50/1M input tokens and $7.50/1M output tokens, 3.6 Flash reduces the overall cost per agentic task, making agents more cost-effective to build and run.
It's a bit disheartening to see no comparison to other models here - and I'm not sure this pushes the curve anywhere. 3.6 flash is more expensive than GLM 5.2 - but seemingly worse, although this post is really light (lite?) on details.
It seemed for a time that Google had finally gotten the ball rolling, but I'm doubting that more and more as time passes. We'll see what happens with 3.5 pro I suppose.
No word about updating Jules, which is still stuck on 3.1 Pro. I get that it's probably niche but I've really appreciated basically being able to give directions to Jules on my phone, then reviewing and merging a GitHub PR fifteen minutes later. It's been great for getting some progress in on a few personal projects during my commute when I can't exactly pull out my laptop.
I have a side business selling custom fingerprint jewelry and I use gemini nano banana to clean up customer submitted fingerprint images. This was a step I used to do by hand at 10 - 15 minutes per image and nano banana is the first model that is able to do the task (it is astonishingly good at it). I can't wait to see what the next nano banana can do, hopefully its released soon.
So 3.6 Flash is a somewhat of an admission that Google miscalculated by charging 3-5x for 3.5 Flash what it did for 3.0 Flash (3x input and output costs plus large token inefficiency changes) despite only modest improvements?
3.5 Flash Lite is only a hair cheaper than 3.0 Flash, but I think 3.0 Flash is a massively more capable model?
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 70.0 ms ] thread"3.6 Flash delivers higher precision with fewer unwanted code edits and reduced execution loops, as seen in DeepSWE (49% vs. 37%)"
So which one is it? 65% or 49%?
Has anybody found any models better at image or audio analysis?
you can check by asking "list notable world events in 2025, only list unplanned" on aistudio. or you can ask for Charlie Kirk, it also does not know. I tried it multiple time to ensure that I didn't not get routed to older models!
> but google has search
irrelevant, without deeper knowledge about cutting edge technologies or latest libraries, all of it suggestions are crap. even you ask it to search it will still use outdated keyword thus only getting outdated information.
in other word, what a disaster!
funny because some people downvoted me believed that there is no relation between knowledge cut off date and real world events. that's not how it works!
It is also cheaper than 3.5:
> This enhanced efficiency is also combined with a lower price than 3.5 Flash. At $1.50/1M input tokens and $7.50/1M output tokens, 3.6 Flash reduces the overall cost per agentic task, making agents more cost-effective to build and run.
It seemed for a time that Google had finally gotten the ball rolling, but I'm doubting that more and more as time passes. We'll see what happens with 3.5 pro I suppose.
Anyone have any good alternatives?
https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-3-6-flash?intell...
2.5 Flash: $0.3 / $2.5
3.0 Flash: $0.5 / $3
3.5 Flash: $1.5 / $9
3.6 Flash: $1.5 / $7.5
---
2.5 Flash-Lite: $0.1 / $0.4
3.1 Flash-Lite: $0.25 / $1.5
3.5 Flash-Lite: $0.3 / $2.5
Gemini 3.6 Flash https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48993130
3.5 Flash Lite is only a hair cheaper than 3.0 Flash, but I think 3.0 Flash is a massively more capable model?