Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

Posted by meetpateltech 12/17/2025

1102 points | 580 commentspage 4

xnx 12/17/2025|

OpenAI is pretty firmly in the rear-view mirror now.

walthamstow 12/17/2025|

Google Antigravity is a buggy mess at the moment, but I believe it will eventually eat Cursor as well. The £20/mo tier currentluy has the highest usage limits on the market, including Google models and Sonnet and Opus 4.5.

tempaccount420 12/17/2025||

It's not in Google's style, but they need a codex-like fine-tune. I don't think they have ever released fine-tunes like that though.

The model is very hard to work with as is.

k8sToGo 12/17/2025||

I remember the preview price for 2.5 flash was much cheaper. And then it got quite expensive when it went out of preview. I hope the same won't happen.

Tiberium 12/17/2025|

For 2.5 Flash Preview the price was specifically much cheaper for the no-reasoning mode, in this case the model reasons by default so I don't think they'll increase the price even further.

Fiveplus 12/17/2025||

It is interesting to see the "DeepMind" branding completely vanish from the post. This feels like the final consolidation of the Google Brain merger. The technical report mentions a new "MoE-lite" architecture. Does anyone have details on the parameter count? If this is under 20B params active, the distillation techniques they are using are lightyears ahead of everyone else.

rw2 12/18/2025||

They didn't put Opus 4.5 on the model card to compare

FergusArgyll 12/17/2025||

So much for "Monopolies get lazy, they just rent seek and don't innovate"

NitpickLawyer 12/17/2025||

Also so much for the "wall, stagnation, no more data" folks. Womp womp.

deskamess 12/17/2025|||

Monopolies and wanna-be monopolies on the AI-train are running for their lives. They have to innovate to be the last one standing (or second last) - in their mind.

jonathan_h 12/17/2025|||

"Monopolies get lazy, they just rent seek and don't innovate"

I think part of what enables a monopoly is absence of meaningful competition, regardless of how that's achieved -- significant moat, by law or regulation, etc.

I don't know to what extent Google has been rent-seeking and not innovating, but Google doesn't have the luxury to rent-seek any longer.

incrudible 12/17/2025|||

LLMs are a big threat to their search engine revenue, so whatever monopoly Google may have had does not exist anymore.

concinds 12/17/2025||

The LLM market has no moats so no one "feels" like a monopoly, rightfully.

bayarearefugee 12/17/2025||

Gemini is so awful at any sort of graceful degradation whenever they are under heavy load.

Its great that they have these new fast models, but the release hype has made Gemini Pro pretty much unusable for hours.

"Sorry, something went wrong"

random sign-outs

random garbage replies, etc

addajones 12/18/2025||

I really wish Google would make a macOS desktop app for Gemini just like ChatGPT and Claude have. I'd use it much more if I could login with my sub and not have to open a web browser every single time.

alach11 12/17/2025||

I really wish these models were available via AWS or Azure. I understand strategically that this might not make sense for Google, but at a non-software-focused F500 company it would sure make it a lot easier to use Gemini.

lbhdc 12/17/2025||

I feel like that is part of their cloud strategy. If your company wants to pump a huge amount of data through one of these you will pay a premium in network costs. Their sales people will use that as a lever for why you should migrate some or all of your fleet to their cloud.

jiggawatts 12/17/2025||

A few gigabytes of text is practically free to transfer even over the most exorbitant egress fee networks, but would cost “get finance approval” amounts of money to process even through a cheaper model.

lbhdc 12/18/2025||

It sounds like you already know what sales peoples incentives are. They don't care about the tiny players who wanna use tiny slices. I was referring to people who are trying to push PB through these. GCPs policies make a lot of sense if they are trying to get major players to switch their compute/data host to reduce overall costs.

jiggawatts 12/18/2025||

The cost ratio is the same.

lbhdc 12/19/2025||

It isn't. You don't pay "msrp" at scale :)

jiggawatts 12/20/2025||

You're off by orders of magnitude. A million tokens is about 5 MB of text and costs $0.20 to process in something like Gemini 3 Flash.

Hence, a terabyte of text would cost about $42,000 to run through a pareto-frontier "cheap" model.

The most expensive cloud egress fee I could quickly find is $185 per terabyte (Azure South America Internet egress).

Hence, AI processing is 200x as expensive as bandwidth, or put another way, even a long-distance international egress at "exorbitant cloud retail pricing" is a mere 0.5% of the cost.

Petabytes, exabytes, etc... just adds digits to both the token cost and bandwidth cost in sync and won't significantly shift the ratio. If anything, bandwidth costs will go down and AI costs go up because: output tokens, smarter models, retries, multiple questions for the same data, etc...

dandiep 12/17/2025||

For someone looking to switch over to Gemini from OpenAI, are there any gotchas one should be aware of? E.g. I heard some mention of API limits and approvals? Or in terms of prompt writing? What advice do people have?

scrollop 12/17/2025|

https://epoch.ai/benchmarks/simplebench

Just do it.

I use a service where I have access to all SOTA models and many open sourced models, so I change models within chats, using MCPs eg start a chat with opus making a search with perplexity and grok deepsearch MCPs and google search, next query is with gpt 5 thinking Xhigh, next one with gemini 3 pro, all in the same conversation. It's fantastic! I can't imagine what it would be like again to be locked into using one (or two) companies. I have nothing to do with the guys who run it (the hosts from the podcast This day in AI, though if you're interested have a look in the simtheory.ai discord.

I don't know how people use one service can manage...

dandiep 12/17/2025||

99% of what I do is fine-tuned models, so there is a certain level of commitment I have to make around training and time to switch.

doomerhunter 12/17/2025|

Pretty stoked for this model. Building a lot with "mixture of agents" / mix of models and Gemini's smaller models do feel really versatile in my opinion.

Hoping that the local ones keep progressively up (gemma-line)

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