3.6 Flash would be a great model at 3.0 flash pricing. At this pricing, its thoroughly trounced by about 10 models on cost/performance including Grok 4.5. 3.5 Flash-ite would be a great model at 2.5 flash-lite pricing, as is, its trounced by many models including Deepseek v4 Flash.

As is, they are thoroughly outclassed for most usecases. I will say the one area where i do see Gemini punching above its weight class is in tasks that are effectively "Google this for me" / knowledge stuff. So it does have a role, and I do use it. So while I think Google is still in a strong position overall, they are really stuck as a tier 2 AI player right now with text models. They are tier 1 in bio, images, and video.

3.5 Flash was always too expensive for a "flash" model. They marketed it as "near frontier" level, but there are several order-of-magnitude cheaper open models that compete with it.

Am I off, or does Google have the pricing that varies the most between model generation releases?