I don’t get why people keep acting like Gemini is so bad?
Now Gemini 3.6 Flash just come out and the whole of Twitter is just bashing it for no reason, acting like Google is totally finished in the AI race.
Like how good were you really expecting to be?
And why would you even compare this to a model like Fable or GPT-6.5 Sol?
Anti-Gemini narrative (just look at that massively inflated y-axis):
Reality — look at where 3.6 Flash is and look at Kimi K3, look at Sonnet & Fable 5…:
This is a mid-tier model for goodness sake. It’s not supposed to dominate every leaderboard and crush every benchmark.
This was a real upgrade with real improvements. It’s better than other mid-tier models like Sonnet 5 in certain areas.
And it’s even better than some frontier models like Grok-4.5 at multiple things.
People are just jumping to trash a good and promising model because that’s what trendy right now.
I bet many of them have never actually used Gemini since like 1.5 Pro came out 2 years ago.
Gemini right now has been amazing for me in coding — yes coding.
Especially Gemini in Devin/Windsurf (maybe some harnesses are much better than others).
Multiple times it has fixed bugs in my codebase that other models simply weren’t able too.
Gemini 3.6 Flash is comparable to Claude Opus 4.8 in intelligence, in the AI Arena leaderboard:
We’ve gotten so used to every new model topping the benchmarks that we’ve forgotten that there are other ways a model can improve other than raw intelligence.
Improvements like token efficiency, intelligence per cost, and intelligence-speed ratio.
Gemini 3.6 Flash’s blazing speed will make the most ideal for many real-world applications where latency needs to be as low as possible.
And some devs act like coding is the only thing people use AI models for.
Okay maybe Gemini is really so so terrible at coding compared to Claude for you — but that’s actually only one use case, you know — out of several dozens and hundreds.
It doesn’t have to be the absolute best at every single thing.
Google is not only thinking about developers when they make their models — in case you didn’t know, they have a user base of multiple billions with all sorts of goals and interests and careers.
And unlike OpenAI or Anthropic, they have a whole of a lot more going on for them other than AI.
They don’t have to constantly release model after model to keep investors pleased and not go bankrupt.
They even have positive cashflow — with or without any of the AI stuff.
They have the means to be a lot more patient and play the long game.
And once you zoom out beyond the developer community, you’ll see that they’re doing very well even in the short game.
900 million monthly active users in the Gemini app.
Millions of positive reviews and 5-star reviews on both app stores.
Even Gemini API itself is in massive demand with over 13 million users — so despite the narrative they are still a lot of developers and businesses that consider Gemini models to be the best choice possible for their apps and systems (I’m one of them btw).
Something tells me they’re not half as worried as people think they are.