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News of the day
1. Google launches Gemini 3.8 Flash, its third budget model in six weeks, matching Claude Opus 5 on coding benchmarks but with higher practical costs. → Read more
2. Perplexity releases Lily, an open-source Rust and Metal inference engine optimized for Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on Apple Silicon, achieving significant speedups. → Read more
3. Salesforce's 2026 report on agentic AI in the enterprise, detailing adoption, challenges, and future trends. → Read more
4. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman cautions against the current AI data center expansion, citing "unsustainable silliness" and potential for wasted investment. → Read more
Our take
Hi Dotikers!
Google just released Gemini 3.8 Flash, its third budget model in six weeks. The Flash line is Google's fast, cheap tier, built for developers running everyday workloads. This one comes with a Cyber variant restricted to security teams, and a bold claim: on some coding benchmarks it nearly matches Claude Opus 5, Anthropic's top model, at roughly one seventh of the per-token price.
The catch is on the invoice. The list price is identical to 3.7 Flash ($0.75 per million input tokens, $3.75 per million output). But to be smarter, the model reasons longer and generates more tokens on every task. According to independent measurements from Artificial Analysis, a typical task now costs about 40 percent more than on 3.7 Flash. Same price per unit, you just burn more units. Google half admits it, recommending 3.7 for anyone optimizing for efficiency.
The contrast with Anthropic is telling. The same week, Fable 5.1 shipped at unchanged prices but uses fewer tokens for the same results, with cache reads 75 percent cheaper. Two opposite ways of selling "more performance at the same price".
The bigger question remains. Google keeps shipping small models while Gemini 3.5 Pro, the flagship promised for June, is still missing, and DeepMind just changed leadership. On the fast-and-cheap front, Google executes very well. On the front it claimed to lead, we are still waiting.
Alex.
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