Gemini 3.8 Flash: Google's third budget model in six weeks, frontier still MIA
The Decoder · rss · 2026-09-03
The Decoder reports Google shipped Gemini 3.8 Flash — its third Flash budget model in six weeks — while frontier models remain missing. It matches Claude Opus 5 on some agentic coding benchmarks at lower cost, but its 'working harder' reasoning burns 30% more output tokens per task, making it pricier in practice than its predecessor despite identical token rates.
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