LLM reception is truly extreme, even worse than AAA game releases.

Ever frontier lab lived it at least once : missing the frontier by a few months triggers extremly negative reactions, then you take back the lead for 2 weeks, and the hype cycle repeats.

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?

Pretty underwhelming, as expected honestly. I don't want to know what morale is like at DeepMind right now.

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.

I'm a big fan of the Flash-Lite models. They're exceedingly fast and deliver great outputs for high volume use cases where you need to process requests at scale. Can't wait to try the newer version.

Flash Lite: 0.3/m and 2.5/m

Deepseek Pro: 0.435/m 0.87/m

That's wildly ambitious pricing by Google. You can maybe get away with spicy pricing at the SOTA edge but at the lower tiers everything is a lot more price sensitive.

"..and in some benchmarks like DeepSWE by Datacurve, we observe up to 65%, all at a lower cost per output token."

"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%?

tl;dr: 3.6 flash is a bit smarter than 3.5 flash, but also a bit more expensive.

My results [0] put Gemini 3.6 Flash at the top.

3.6 Flash high has same $1.5 input price as 3.5 Flash, but output is cheaper from $9.0 to $7.5.

Google said 3.6 Flash is more token efficient, but in my tests it's actually LESS token efficient[1] than 3.5 Flash, so despite the output price reduction, it still costs more.

[0]: https://aibenchy.com/compare/google-gemini-3-6-flash-medium/...

[1]: https://aibenchy.com/compare/google-gemini-3-6-flash-high/go...

I was expecting 3.6 Pro. It's been so long since the last Pro model...

Are they comparing 3.6 Flash to 5.6 Luna and losing? That's ruff.