The race to the bottom continues

I have to say:

The Google brand remains powerful on HN!

I’m shocked.

It's a shame Google crams it ham-fistedly into search results and that Google has some of the reputation it has because I actually really enjoy Gemini and I don't even use it for the reason people often list which is that you can cross-reference it to stuff in your Google account

I would really love to be able to use these Gemini models in Opencode or Pi with my existing Google AI Pro subscription.

3.8 uses nearly twice as many tokens as 3.7. One might be inclined to think that they just increased the thinking budgets...

3.7 used 64M on high: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-3-7-flash 3.8 used 120M on high: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-3-8-flash

Even their own chart showed more than 2x higher cost compared to 3.7: https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ima...

3.8 uses nearly twice as many tokens as 3.7. One might be inclined to think that they just uppsed the thinking budgets...

3.7 used 64M on high: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-3-7-flash 3.8 used 120M on high: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-3-8-flash

Even their own chart showed more than 2x higher cost compared to 3.7: https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ima...

Whatever they’re using within the Maps app is not good at all. I cannot just ask it for things conversationally like I do with ChatGPT. They really need to put a better model in there. I don’t even think it maintains context across two different queries within the same session. It’s not seamless and doesn’t just “get it” like ChatGPT does.

Yesterday I asked for food stop on my road trip 45 minutes from the current time and it gave me some options, but then I changed my mind and specifically asked for Asian restaurants and it completely forgot about the 45 minutes and gave me the closest Asian restaurant to me.

>"safety performance" - this starting to get long in the tooth. Gemini cut programming session 3 times for "safety reasons" yesterday for mentioning image generation (I need to generate bunch of those for infinite zoom virtual training app experience). After I got creative and managed to trick it to answer t was of course because "think of a children"

And in my other app I was debugging and using OpenAI to optimize some path it cut me off numerous times because it did not like JIT functionality (this is my commercial business rule evaluation engine that compiles rules to executable code inside the app to increase performance using asmjit library)

I am basically paying for them to waste my tokens and time on these 2 tasks

Who coined the phrase "cyber" for security related things lol. It's so 1999.

love these flash models