r/GeminiAI • u/Mrb0dycatch3r • 4h ago

Discussion Does anything even compare to 3.8 Flash?

As a completely neutral user, I feel like the value u get for free tier gemini on Google is just insanely good at the moment? (For general chatting, basic research)
Non-sloppy answers with blazing speed. Google is getting a lot of shit since they're not frontier despite the prime position, but I feel like the average users are doing pretty good
edit; wasn't aware that it's gone soon lol

76 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

60 comments sorted by

52

u/tanbirj 4h ago

Value aside, give Fable or Astra a try. Gemini is no where near that level

7

u/Mrb0dycatch3r 4h ago

I mean free use here but yeah these are frontier for sure

3

u/tanbirj 4h ago

Yeah, that’s why I mentioned the value bit. I was once a huge fan of Gemini, I had the ultra plan. But they retired that plan, I and don’t have access to Deepthink.

For my use cases, Flash does not give me anything like the depth and detail I need.

1

u/Ok_Ruin4016 3h ago

The Ultra plan was not discontinued. It's still available it's just expensive.

The $20/mo AI Pro plan is getting access to Deep Think soon, which was previously only available at the $99/mo and $199/mo AI Ultra tiers.

4

u/AllMyFaults 3h ago

But it's not 'no where near' the models are more capable and bench higher than 3.8 but we've reached a parity state in AI that that they're all just about accomplishing the same day to day tasks at par with each other. To hedge on OPs position, one is achivable at a much more affordable rate that won't eat your weekly tokens with 3-5 prompts

2

u/tonton8787 4h ago

Average users don't have to go that far

3

u/outphase84 2h ago

Argon is fantastic

1

u/KoTDS_Apex 1h ago

Opus 5.5 is all I need tbh. Maybe with Fable as advisor

-9

u/Bulky_Blood_7362 4h ago

It's not even close to sonnet or luna lol

3

u/rafark 3h ago

3.8 high is really good and competent actually 

2

u/nerosani 2h ago

No, 3.8 is much better than sonnet for many cases. (Of course is just my own workflow/ so certain cases may vary). But in my experience sonnet is far below 3.8

2

u/Bulky_Blood_7362 2h ago

Nah you have to be a bot how can you even compare the two...

https://giphy.com/gifs/G31qDpgbdpFPnGInD2

2

u/nerosani 2h ago edited 1h ago

I don't know, sonnet has a worse result when I tested something from a personal project. And 3.8 has a better result. (As of three days ago).

1

u/Georgefakelastname 3h ago

Flash is comparable to Luna. Where are you getting the idea Luna is better than it from?

0

u/Old-Dish-7104 3h ago

you don't even need to use luna, as 6.1 sol is so cheap. Gemini is nowhere near even to deepseek v4.1 flash. Of course, if we talking for absolutely 0 dollars gemini is great, but you can't do serious staff with it

2

u/Georgefakelastname 3h ago

Masterful goalpost shifting.

3.8 flash also beats DeepSeek v4.1 flash in basically everything but coding. If I need a model to code, I’m not using either of these two models lol.

-3

u/Bulky_Blood_7362 3h ago

Use it lol... benchmarks aren't everything. Luna beats gemini easily

1

u/Georgefakelastname 3h ago

Using it for what lol? Flash dogwalks Luna in my usage for it

-5

u/Bulky_Blood_7362 3h ago

Nice joke

16

u/Cunningcory 3h ago

First of all, I'm not sure how you have 3.8 flash on the free plan. Mine is still 3.6.

Secondly, yeah, Flash is going away so you might want to start looking elsewhere.

2

u/sodantok 31m ago

AI studio likely 

-2

u/froody 1h ago

Ask 3.6 what model it is, there’s UI bugs, my iOS app UI says 3.6 but the model says it’s 3.8

3

u/Cunningcory 1h ago

"I am Gemini 3.6 Flash, a large language model built by Google."

9

u/PineappleLemur 3h ago

Luna on ChatGPT chat is unlimited for free users.

It is comparable capabilities wise, just a bit slower.

Also free Gemini only get up to 3.6 and flash lite models... You definitely don't get 3.8 for free.

1

u/Complete_Ad_307 1h ago

Free, unless you upload picture or document that is. Then after few messages it goes buy premium.

11

u/maester_t 4h ago

Yeah, the hate I see posted in some of these subreddits has me baffled.

I can use pretty much any free LLM from any company and I seem to get great results (almost) every time.

Yes, some of them have a hiccup every now and then, but for FREE, I think they're all pretty amazing. And when I think something is off, just ask again and they seem to always double-check and correct themselves.

Maybe I'm just missing the context from some of these posts though.

Maybe these people are complaining about the paid versions? And are they using them for their jobs? Then, eh, I suppose I might complain... But not with all the "omfg this is the worst evar! It was much moar better yearz ago!!1! This company needs to be sued into oblivion for releasing this model...."

3

u/Beneficial-Corgi3593 4h ago

I have to recognize antropic & openai are in a hole new level but the amont of quota you get with 3.8 flash is insane. Today I used opus 5.5 to code review changes made with gemini 3.8 flash and despite the critical finding i got surprised how fast the 5 hour limit was reached didn’t even completed the plan

4

u/Forward_Jackfruit813 4h ago

Qwen 3.8 Flash Next feels better than Gemini 3.8 Flash

6

u/macaronianddeeez 4h ago

Qwen 3.8 flash next is a pretty powerful model all things considered

1

u/Bulky_Blood_7362 3h ago

Because it is

1

u/NomadStorm 3h ago

Qwen 4 must be close to release by now surely? Are they waiting until Anthropic’s IPO before they release or something?

2

u/BlueberrySpiritual 3h ago

I thought 3.7 flash was more consistent. I like them for chatting and they do fine for coding but I don’t trust them as much as I do Luna max or sonnet for example.

6

u/Acrobatic-Monitor516 4h ago

whatever model the chatgpt app uses is better for me. hallucinates less, provides more contextual responses, is less "lazy"

3

u/Mrb0dycatch3r 4h ago

I was using ChatGPT for years actually but after cancelling the Plus I hate it recently. It has this slop vibe, hard to describe but overly long, fantastic like outputs just make me not want to use it (I love codex tho)

7

u/Acrobatic-Monitor516 4h ago

I gave it instructions to be succinct. I really try to move to Gemini but chatGPT provides much better answers so far

3

u/Somerandom009 4h ago

Gemini sucks now. They are taking away flash and pro for free users in a few days and forcing you to use 3.5 flash-lite which is a model so bad it is worse than just google search AI mode

1

u/TheWoodenRetention 4h ago

The chatgpt thing is wild to me because mine started giving me back my own words slightly rearranged and I had to switch.

1

u/No_Decision_6940 3h ago

Free ChatGPT is still better than paid Gemini. The limits suck, though.

1

u/Acrobatic-Monitor516 2h ago

exactly. those limits got me trying to switch to gemini. you upload 2 images and you get locked out of more advanced models, can't get further responses from that chat, or send any more images, that sucks

4

u/TechnologyMinute2714 4h ago

3.8 flash is definitely very decent for just chatting, asking some random questions, general knowledge etc. it might not excel at coding or math or whatever the other labs are focusing on but it definitely has the most amount of "data" it seems, well maybe not inside the specific flash models but pro models of Gemini has always been great at that "random info" data.

I like how i can just open AI Studio and basically talk constantly for hours even reaching 300k tokens context in the chat and i never run out of any usage or quota with just a basic AI Pro plan.

For anything else that requires coding or computer usage i use Opus 5.5 and Claude Code though.

4

u/AyaanshGaur25 4h ago

Id hate to break it to you...

3

u/a355231 4h ago

Oh boy, did anybody tell you? Also Claude has a better free tier.

2

u/No-Anchovies 3h ago

every model from every brand is great if the task is "just chatting". the moment anything deterministic is involved then shit hits the fan. I believe most complaints come from there. the 3.8 is absolute trash in that department

1

u/Ggoddkkiller 1h ago

Bro is living in an alternative universe. First of all they are removing Pro and Flash from free tiers. You will use 'mighty' flash-lite from now on. And even Flash 3.8 ain't that good, it often hallucinates all over the place. Claude's Sonnet is the best free tier by VERY FAR even if you don't get much quota. At least you get quality answers not a random hallucination nonsense like Gemini..

1

u/ReyFauno 1h ago

No sabía que se le iba tan pronto? No te entendí pero concuerdo contigo , Géminis es muy generoso con los usuarios y sus cuotas ojalá y siga así ese modelo frontera mejor todo

1

u/Jormaren 52m ago

It had hallucinated for me to the point where I don’t trust it anymore

1

u/XerxesBlitZ 22m ago

sonnet 5.5

1

u/Majukun 4m ago

I think you are overestimating the quality of research that gemini can do. It's one thing to give you news like it knows what it is talking about, one thing is actually knowing what it is talking about and be able to understand context and time.

1

u/Yawningchromosone 2m ago

Gemini... dom är för sega. Hinner inte med tempot pga deras tröga system. Visst, flash är snabb... men bara som en glorifierad google sökning. Tyvärr kommer dom andra som bara Har AI som main purpose springs ifrån google som har tusen andra projekt på gång samtidigt. Trodde I min enfald att google skulle haka på kapplöpningen men dom lägger resurser på annat.

2

u/Sea-Priority-1888 4h ago

3.8 actively hallucinates and lies to you so no

2

u/NotTonightDad 4h ago

No it doesn’t. That is just a blatant lie. If you are not prompting it well or feeding it source information, that is your own problem.

3

u/AllMyFaults 3h ago

Not that it needs to be proven at this point to be true, but I'm almost certain this sub is being targeted by bots to shill other products

1

u/hdhddf 3h ago

I haven't had that issue, I've been impressed with how reliable it is at writing code

0

u/IBM296 3h ago

It's a good model, but yeah it's not on par with other flash models e.g GLM 5.3 Flash, DeepSeek 4.1 Flash and Qwen 3.8 Flash.

Not to mention free users will lose access to it this week lol

3

u/NomadStorm 3h ago

Come on at least mention qwen 3.8 flash next. It’s a huge improvement.

1

u/Bulky_Blood_7362 3h ago

Here before the gemini bots come to downvote this comment

1

u/AllMyFaults 3h ago

Good we didn't want the freeloaders.

Jokes aside, I do not see those flash models being better overall at all.

1

u/Ok-Magazine2227 3h ago

I've been getting comparable results using 3.8 Flash as I do with opus. I use /boost instead of using pro or Claude and it's pretty much just as good. I don't give very deep things being Database work but the mistakes are similar in either model.

1

u/Bulky_Blood_7362 4h ago

Deepseek if you need free

0

u/d_e_u_s 3h ago

Flash is genuinely a subordinate creature compared to frontier models. I've used 3.8 flash as a worker agent and 6.1 sol as orchestrator and gpt just despairs in how poorly 3.8 flash does its work. It can't even adhere to simple instructions in long-horizon research tasks.