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Posted by bratao 1 day ago

Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber(blog.google)
https://deepmind.google/models/model-cards/gemini-3-8-flash/
1126 points | 636 commentspage 14
tacomonstrous 1 day ago|
Looks like Google's given up on frontier models for external consumption?
heyjamesknight 1 day ago||
Gemini 4 pre training is underway: https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2079594867161022817

My guess is we skip 3.5 and go straight to 4 Pro. With the monthly Flash releases, releasing 4.0 Flash and Pro in 6-8 weeks would be a nice buildup.

(I work at Google but don't know anything that isn't already public)

WarmWash 1 day ago|||
Latest rumor is that 3.5 pro was struggling to be meaningfully better than flash, since iterations on flash were moving much faster than iterations on pro, likely due to model size (flash is estimated to be in the 200-400B range).
VirusNewbie 1 day ago||
I found 3.5 pro to be much better than 3.5 flash, but 3.7 flash with high reasoning is comparable and way way faster.
j16sdiz 1 day ago||
There are no public release of 3.5 pro. Either its a typo, or you have some insider information
WarmWash 1 day ago|||
Googlers and some external workplaces have had 3.5 pro access for a few months now.
VirusNewbie 1 day ago|||
Check my profile?
iamdelirium 1 day ago|||
How can you say that when a Flash model is benchmarking close to Opus and Sol?
ok123456 1 day ago|||
Given up frontier models for selling compute.
thisisauserid 1 day ago||
They don't want to release a frontier model that requires data sharing with the government and right now it looks like they'd have to.
shuvrojit 1 day ago||
Gemini is getting less useful with each update. I could edit a pdf with the 3-pro model before but 3.1-pro couldn't edit the given pdf nor it could generate one for me.
HarHarVeryFunny 22 hours ago||
If you want to "edit" a PDF, then Claude Sonnet works well, although what it's going to do is regenerate it from scratch trying to retain overall formatting. It can even do this for scanned PDFs and foreign language ones that need translating.

If you just need to create PDFs, not edit them, then Gemini notebook (notebook.google) works well and has Google's usual very high free usage limits.

AFAIK in general you can't really edit PDFs since it's not a reflowable format - even with Adobe tools all that editing does is modify the text within a text box - not reflow the document to adjust to any change in size of the text box.

leumon 1 day ago|||
You probably mean 3.5-flash? Pro is still good for a lot of use cases, but it seems it's still officially in the "preview" phase.
ipsod 1 day ago||
3.5 pro doesn't exist yet?
shuvrojit 1 day ago||
Sorry my bad, I messed up the numbers, 3 and 3.1 pro. All of these model numbers have me confused
coffeecoders 1 day ago||
One place where I find the Flash models surprisingly bad is Google Search's "AI Mode".

A recent example - I searched for how to unsubscribe from Pearson emails. Google Search "AI Mode" confidently gave me a sequence of steps along the lines of Settings > Profile > Email preferences > Unsubscribe.

Of course, I looked for an unsubscribe link before asking Google. None of those options existed. The correct answer was there is no way to unsubscribe through the account, so I just blockthe emails instead.

I've run into this pattern quite a few times. AI Mode seems to make up things all the time.

inventor7777 1 day ago||
I think that's just a limitation on the size of the model. I'm pretty sure that they use a pretty small model in those summaries to save money, which naturally makes them a little less smart.
coffeecoders 1 day ago||
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pixl97 1 day ago|||
https://www.pearson.com/privacy-center/privacy-notices/full-...

>We will not send marketing emails to a user who has opted out of receiving them. Any marketing communications we send will include an unsubscribe link at the end of the email.

I don't think this is AI's fault. This is Pearson's publishing incorrect information and the only way to really know they are a bunch of lying assholes is to have an account and try to unsubscribe from it.

AI didn't make it up, Pearson's did.

coffeecoders 1 day ago||
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xyzzy_plugh 1 day ago||
It's not the models, it's the guardrails.

It's obvious that the Google Search AI Mode encourages the model to give an answer without spending unnecessary cycles investigating deeply.

They also heavily encourage keeping the context short. For example, it will remove the option to start a new turn after a small number of turns, depending on the topic.

It definitely makes things up all the time, but it gets it right surprisingly often. I really like it.

Alpha3031 18 hours ago||
The search model is probably flash-lite based on what they give to users who aren't signed in.
greenowl 1 day ago|
Not to rain on anyone's parade but I find it strange how excited and giddy people on HN get for any new X.X model releases. Pumping it straight to the top, clamoring to use it, check and compare benchmarks, bragging about it being your "daily driver"?

Are you people truly this excited about this crap? I mean I guess if you work for Google or Anthropic or whatever I could see it??? Otherwise, are these just bot comments?

ipsod 1 day ago||
Gemini Flash is the one I get most excited about, because it's so fast and so good at real-world knowledge, and it's improving so fast - look at how much the benchmarks improved in ~1 month. It's just categorically different than anything else.

Also, I use it every day, and it just got ~10% better at coding, according to the benchmarks. How is that not exciting?

rjh29 21 hours ago||
I use Gemini every day and I've noticed any subjective improvement. In many cases it feels worse because it does fewer Google searches than before. As a result I find it hard to get excited about it.

I do think Gemini is underrated on HN though!

nick__m 14 hours ago|||
If you used, you would know. There's something addicting seeing the vertigo inducing progression of that technology.

I am a light user so I don't get the shakes when my monthly azure dev credits run out but I would be susceptible to being addicted to it if I was on a subscription with generous usage allowance and random usage counter resets.

drbscl 1 day ago|||
Given that they push capabilities at the pareto frontier, yeah

A lot of us use these in our services, so we're getting an upgrade "for free"

deno 1 day ago|||
You know how the saying goes that you have to pick two out of three: cheap, fast or good? This is all of those. Pretty exciting.

I'll wait for Astra and Grok 4.7 announcements but probably getting at least one Ultra subscription.

Since testing 3.7 on Pro for last two weeks I'm realizing just how long I'm waiting on other models. I've been multitasking to compensate but it's exhausting so I'd rather not.

anslopic4 18 hours ago||
Yes they are mostly shill and bot comments. Some of the big accounts are paid influencers, some of the other comments are purely AI.

HN sells these advertising services. Nobody is using “Claude” etc.

They will censor comments like yours and my reply here because we call it out.

It’s very weird that basically lies and disinformation became the optimal meta in business and in life! But here we are

rvz 15 hours ago||
Correct. This orange site has evidently gone under AI psychosis especially in model release posts and is overrun by AI bots, paid influencers and even small creeping signs of crypto pumpfun scams [0].

Even making a tiny joke is too much [1] for some.

> They will censor comments like yours and my reply here because we call it out.

Don't bother calling it out, it does not work. There are protected accounts where the guidelines don't apply to them and moderators allow this and ban others who do the same thing. [2]

It is pointless, and HN is cooked for this.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49521145

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48838228

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49366029