Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

(blog.google)

76 points | by simonsarris 2 hours ago ago

17 comments

  • kamranjon an hour ago

    They've interestingly left out any mention of speed.

    I have been testing 3.7 flash against 3.5 flash and it seems to lose every time in overall latency. Every benchmark I've seen seems to suggest the opposite[1] - that 3.7 flash is significantly (at times 2x) faster than 3.5 flash - but I have never been able to prove this out in real world use cases.

    Has anyone found their latency numbers to actually be accurate? Is this why they've toned it down in this release? For context, I'm testing larger generation payloads that take 8-10 seconds in 3.5 flash and 15-25 seconds in 3.7 flash. Lowest reasoning settings in both cases.

    1: https://artificialanalysis.ai/?speed=intelligence-vs-speed&m...

    • film42 41 minutes ago

      It depends on how you're querying Gemini models. OpenRouter is the fastest by far. I'm guessing they bought the dedicated pipe from Google. Gemini via VertexAI and consumer API has pretty bad latency.

      • kamranjon 39 minutes ago

        Yea I am testing through OpenRouter - have you noticed 3.7 flash being significantly faster?

  • TechRemarker 37 minutes ago

    Hopefully before they release 4.0 Flash we will finally get Gemini 3.5 Pro.

  • eis 11 minutes ago

    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...

  • atemerev 44 minutes ago

    Everyone is censoring models now with anything remotely resembling cyber or bio. I already have problems with my research in mathematical epidemiology because of that - both Sol and Fable simply refuse. They keep pushing people towards Chinese models that can be decensored.

    • vehemenz 34 minutes ago

      Supposedly Fable 5.1 is better, but I haven't tried it yet. I've run into the same thing with mundane work that is barely bio/cyber adjacent.

      Re: Chinese models, even if the model itself isn't censored, some of the big model providers have guardrails now that you can't exceed, which somewhat defeats the purpose.

  • ChrisArchitect an hour ago
  • sergiotapia an hour ago

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

    • 25 minutes ago
      [deleted]
    • estearum an hour ago

      Hasn't the field been called "cybersecurity" since... forever?

    • josefresco 28 minutes ago

      Cyber is more of an early 1990's thing, and I have no issue with it unlike most in the tech field. I feel like it dropped off in the late 90's and early 00's but made a comeback as hacking became a mainstream security issue.

    • cleverpotato479 44 minutes ago

      Amusingly, "cyber" comes from the word "kubernetes"!

    • Gander5739 23 minutes ago

      Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1573/

    • atemerev 44 minutes ago

      A/S/L?