Came and went in a flash

The blog post is gone but I can currently use it in the gemini chat website.

Page - https://web.archive.org/web/20260902151410/https://deepmind.... PDF Card - https://web.archive.org/web/20260902150007/https://storage.g...

Given up frontier models for selling compute.

How can you say that when a Flash model is benchmarking close to Opus and Sol?

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)

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).

According to the WSJ, 3.5 Pro is reportedly being skipped entirely, making Gemini 4 the next flagship model after post-training.

https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/2094937419615502370

Also https://web.archive.org/web/20260902150007/https://storage.g... in case it goes again

  [1] For tone and instruction following, a positive percentage increase represents an improvement in the tone of the model on sensitive topics and the model’s ability to follow instructions while remaining safe compared to Gemini 3 Flash. We mark improvements in green and regressions in red.

Gemini 3 Flash?! So is Gemini 3.8 Flash less safe than 3.7 Flash in all areas besides Text to Text Safety (and identical on Image to Text Safety)?

Why bother with a column “Gemini 3.8 Flash vs. Gemini 3.7 Flash” when you’re going to disregard the label for 20% of it? Also is the “Tone” label short for “Tone and Instruction Following”?

Chartcrime, the major AI lab tradition.

IDK if it's smaller, but I know it's way faster. In one test I did, Flash 3.7 high was ~9.4x faster than Luna High.

But, also... Sol crushes Flash 3.7 at writing code in a codebase of any size beyond "tiny".

Flash is my go-to for prototyping, and basically anything that isn't writing production code.

It's pretty good if you can actively steer it , its actually really really good , the antigravity free tier and pro tiers are generous as well . I'm shocked at how fast it generates tokens.

that's certainly what it's looking like so far. kind of mind boggling ...

Google - we're so back

The benchmark also doesn't include speed. You almost think something has gone wrong when using it because it returns full responses so incredibly fast.

Crushing it on DeepSWE is a very big deal. Excited to give this a try.

We'll see about that. I suspect benchmaxxing as all the labs do as I haven't found Gemini models to be nearly as good in agentic engineering compared to Claude or GPT models.

Gemini 3.5 pro is never going to be released, it was a failure.

it is most likely that 4 pro will be released pretty soon instead, since pre-training for 4 began in late July.

https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2079594867161022817

3.5 pro doesn't exist yet?

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.

It is still going to be better at text work, skills, document review, deep reasoning, architecture review, etc. It is only 6 months old, it isn’t like its world knowledge and software knowledge is really out of date. Use it to churn on harder design problems.

There is no Gemini CLI anymore, nor you can use Gemini with your own harness unless you pay per-token.

It was superseded by the antigravity CLI.

That was sunset and replaced by Antigravity. FWIW until I abandoned it knowing the sunsetting, I was able to get good behavior out of Gemini CLI with overriding the system prompt. The default prompt crippled the harness with very poor instructions, but there was a hidden ENV to override it. Replacing it with Claude Code like prompts based on the model selected, it ran at a much higher intelligence level full stack with significantly less errors.

I haven't had any issues lately.

> The flash models, for coding are reckless in my experience.

My experience is that antigravity is awful and reckless - but that the model itself isn't.

If by reckless you mean commit, push, deploy without me asking it to, the I agree!

Google has been doing staged roll outs on all their products since forever.