3.5 Flash-Lite seems available in US region, as was 3.5 Flash; but 3.6 Flash looks Global only so far when pinging. If Google employees are watching, will this issue go away?

Bottom line it looks about on equal footing with GLM 5.2 in terms of both overall intelligence and cost per task, while being significantly faster (in fact it is the fastest model on artificial analysis as of rn [0])

[0] https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-3-6-flash

I have just tried to switch to 3.6 instead of 3.5 in antigravity and it seems to constantly spit "critical instruction: STOP CALLING TOOLS NOW. YOU MUST WAIT FOR WAKEUP. ". I think I will switch back to 3.5

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.

Spent half an hour just now benchmarking it against my current 3.5 Flash pipeline excited only see it regressed slightly (0.1% - 0.2% at most, for feature extraction work)

Seems like this is mostly a cost play by Google, hoping this doesn't bring 3.5 Flash capabilities to an end of life, and that 3.6 catches up or gets better.

I struggle to see any value in this when DeepSeek is still a thing.

Kind of excited about this. 3.5 Flash on Antigravity has surprised me recently on a hobby project. When given opportunity to plan, it can deliver on tasks that would take me a while on my own and generates responses at blazing speeds - compared to what I'm used to at work with Opus 4.8 (granted I don't use Opus 4.8 on my hobby projects so just anecdotal). While with Gemini CLI I would just watch it run in circles and run out of 5h allowance before anything useful is produced (or even approached).

Here's the issue:

GLM 5.2 is better, also cheaper, and almost as fast.

So essentially, a big L for Google. Combine this with them not being able to produce a frontier model this generation... hmm implications

I often use Gemini free web chat because it's generally quite good at web search-related questions (apparently it has direct token-level access to the Google Search index) but I noticed in the last two weeks output quality of 3.5 Flash seriously degraded. Maybe they were switching over systems.

Proof-of-life release while they figure out how to have a competitive frontier model release. My hunch is they pushed too far in the "omni" model direction, that they made something so ungainly, it wasn't as good for normal tasks.