Gemini 3.5 Flash Looks Good For How Fast It Is

Google once again has a model worth at least some consideration. Gemini 3.5 Flash is likely the best model out there at its particular speed point, as long as you don’t mind that it is a Gemini model. So for cases where speed kills, this can be a reasonable choice. Otherwise, I don’t see signs you would want to use it over Opus 4.7 or GPT-5.5. Google also had some other offerings for I/O Day, which this post will also cover. Introducing Google Gemini 3.5 ‘Flash’ Google introduced Gemini 3.5 Flash, which it seems is for now their universal model until 3.5 Pro comes along. It is live in the usual places. It is a hybrid, where it has the speed of Flash but the cost is at least halfway to models like Opus and GPT-5.5. Gemini 3.5 Pro is confirmed for next month. They are focused on 3.5 Flash as a daily driver for agentic tasks. It has the advantage of being faster and cheaper than Claude Opus 4.7 or GPT-5.5, if it can do the job. Not as cheap as previous Flash models, though, this is basically a hybrid: As always, this is presented as Google’s strongest model yet for all the things. Jeff Dean: 1/ Today at #GoogleIO, we’re releasing Gemini 3.5, our latest family of models combining frontier intelligence with action. We’re starting by releasing 3.5 Flash, which is built to help you execute complex, long-horizon agentic workflows. It outscores 3.1 Pro on agentic and coding benchmarks like Terminal-Bench and MCP Atlas, while running 4x faster than other frontier models. Used in Google Antigravity, 3.5 Flash is even further optimized to be up to 12x faster. It’s a powerful engine to deploy sub-agents that collaborate, run high-frequency iterative loops, and solve real-world problems at scale. Here is their benchmark presentation: Koray Kavukcuoglu: When coupled with the updated Antigravity harness, 3.5 Flash becomes a powerful engine for deploying collaborative subagents to tackle problems at scale for the most demanding use cases. Under supervision, it can reliably execute m