Comment by eis

11 hours ago

3.5 Flash was more expensive than 3.1 Pro to run the Artifical Analysis test suite. $1551 for 3.5 Flash [0] vs $892 for 3.1 Pro [1]. That's 74% more cost while ranking lower. It's 2.5x as fast but I don't think the bang for the buck is there anymore like it was with 3.0 Flash. I'm a bit bummed out to be honest.

I did not expect such a huge (3x) price increase from 3.0 Flash and I bet many people will not just blindly upgrade as the value proposition is widely different.

One interesting point to note is that Google marked the model as Stable in contrast to nearly everything else being perpetually set as Preview.

[0] https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-3-5-flash [1] https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-3-1-pro-preview

6 comments

eis

Reply
hedora  4 hours ago

Ouch. That's going in completely the wrong direction.

How many people complain that we have too much low quality AI output for humans to read, let alone evaluate vs. how many people are complaining that they want higher quality, more trustworthy output?

ekojs  11 hours ago

Seems like the only good thing about 3.5 Flash is its speed. Not cost-competitive or benchmark-leading by any means.

pingou  10 hours ago

How do they calculate that?

3.1 has 57M output tokens from Intelligence Index, 3.5 Flash has 73M, so not a lot more, and 3.5 is a bit cheaper, I don't get how 3.5 can be 74% more expensive.

ls_stats  11 hours ago

>3.5 Flash was more expensive than 3.1 Pro to run the Artifical Analysis test suite

That's everything I needed to know.