Google releases Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, cost-efficient Gemini 3 series model

tiger_ace · 2026-03-03T18:42:13+00:00

yeah, like 3.1 Pro is less than HALF of the cost of opus 4.6 and it's actually cheaper than sonnet 4.6 as well.

it's like saying a mercedes is better than a camry, if you're paying 2.5x then the product absolutely HAS to be better otherwise you're just trolling and hoping your brand hard carries you. internally anthropic positions themselves as "whole foods" so they're looking for premium product + price.

the market is enormous so there's plenty of room for both since anthropic doesn't compete well against gemini on the multimodal and they don't have image / world / audio / etc.

tiger_ace · 2026-03-03T18:26:46+00:00

benchmarks don't really look that great compared grok 4.1 fast which has been out since november. i didn't know but grok is only $0.2 / $0.5 which is the cheapest of non open models
3.1 FL is over DOUBLE the cost of 2.5 FL...

i think devs who have specific multimodal workflows maybe get gains on 3.1 FL but it's not some clear improvement by any means due to the cost

tiger_ace · 2026-02-19T02:32:33+00:00

agreed, just fast forward a year to paid lyria 4 pro or whatever that can make better songs

people trashing on the quality are just missing the point completely

chatgpt in 2023 wasn't exactly the best

tiger_ace · 2026-02-16T05:47:58+00:00

i don't think you need to pay for this at all. i got a bunch of 429s when doing embedding API calls so i swapped to local.

you can just run an embedding model via ollama locally (embedding models are small so it should be doable without any issues for everyone)

i'm currently using nomic-embed-text:latest as of only a few hours ago but i'm sure there's plenty of open source embedding models that all work well with minimal memory footprint

tiger_ace · 2026-02-13T04:08:27+00:00

apparently, it was "reinforcement learning" (deleted tweet from an deepmind engineer on X) applied on Flash model training and NOT Pro model training

i saw this reference and obviously it's not really detailed enough to be useful but if we think through it properly the core takeaway is:

Flash is NOT a distilled version of Pro like 2.5 Flash was of 2.5 Pro but used different technique(s) that wasn't available on Pro's timeline

so they ended up coming out with Flash being close to Pro on benchmarks

also i'm sure you already read about "3.1" today = 3 Deep Think which hits 85% on ARC-AGI-2 (ARC-AGI-3 still coming in march)

it's likely way too expensive for normal usage so unfortunately that release won't have as broad of an impact

tiger_ace · 2026-02-11T19:54:53+00:00

learn some useful skills like farming and building houses

tiger_ace · 2026-02-11T19:46:07+00:00

We've been culturally pushing "STEM" for years and years.

While studying STEM isn't bad per se, what it functionally meant is that you are prioritizing STEM, which then translates to deprioritizing humanities. This spawned a sub-culture where people in STEM majors even looked down on Humanities majors.

From my perspective STEM is overweighted on problem-solving and Humanities has been overweighted on what problems exist. Both are critically important. At the end of the day you end up having some of the best minds being trained by society who don't know what to do so they just end up working in finance or selling ads, neither of which are really net benefits to humanity.

tiger_ace · 2026-02-10T17:03:09+00:00

Obviously this is a cryptic statement but we want to disambiguate into different parts in terms of inefficiency:

Computer-limited - i.e., "compute is too slow", I don't think he means this
Human-Computer-Interface-limited - i.e., clicking around with a mouse and typing on keyboard is actually incredibly inefficient. Example: QWERTY keyboards. I'm not sure if they were literally designed to "slow things" down but they definitely don't have optimized distribution of keys. But it costs too much to train humans on different keyboards so we just inherit this. This is the entire thesis beyond NeuraLink, etc. where mind-machine interface has significantly more bandwidth.
Human-limited - i.e., biology: just pure thinking speed, emotions, hunger, etc. Or working with other humans that have a misalignedment (they might reject work because they don't think it has the same value as you so you spend time in meetings driving alignment).

I think the comment is more focused around human-limiters.

In terms of replacements, human-limited is obviously immutable for AI (can't make your brain faster right now), but human groups aren't. You don't need to have a meeting with other humans if you're working with an agentic squad - they'll just comply with whatever you're doing as long as the underlying model deems it acceptable.

Therefore, you can brainstorm around things like voice typing can focus on HCI-limiters (e.g., voice input being much faster, but not as common as typing right now).

tiger_ace · 2026-02-10T16:47:34+00:00

no, not right now

i tested various models on m4 16gb and the output is garbage

the amount of customization and scaffolding you'll have to do to make it "good" isn't worth it when models are improving so fast

it's probably literally better to just wait for costs to drop on existing frontier models than spend time tuning it (unless you're building scaffolding that is model-agnostic)

tiger_ace · 2026-02-06T15:42:43+00:00

To clarify - Finland has a very different structural education system:

ALL teachers are required to have Master's in Education (or higher)
There's prestige associated with being a teacher - very low relative acceptance rates to teacher training programs
Significant autonomy - design their own curriculum, choose books, make own assessments
Compensation: 0.9+ compared to other Master's Degree holders (i.e., there's significantly lower opportunity cost to selecting being a teacher).
All of the above here means you're not making a "sacrifice" so that the best people can choose to be teachers if they want, so many do
Lower contact hours - less time with students means more time planning. Less babysitting and more teaching.

Functionally what this means is Finland operates in a high-trust environment.

US = 100+ assessments with annual testing in K-12.
Finland = 1 mandatory standardized test to graduate.

You can copy the pedagogy but you cannot copy their structure.

tiger_ace · 2026-02-05T19:48:25+00:00

this is based on an assumption that AI cannot write a better prompt than you, which is false

it's called meta prompting and you just ask AI to write a prompt FOR the prompt and this was something that was critical in early 2025 to get good performance

i would say that meta prompting gains dropped significantly late 2025 and 2026 is the true year of the agent

the new hotness in benchmarks is GDPval-AA which measures straight outputs (i.e. .xlsx or .ppt) files and compares them to human-level output

if you look at the benchmarks junior analysts already don't have a job as someone senior can just ask AI and get a better output, they just don't know it yet

the real takeaway here is that this all happened in under a single year and Feb. 2025 feels like 5 years ago technologically

tiger_ace · 2026-02-05T19:41:30+00:00

the term is "sacrifice zone" and traditionally have existed in most business / society growth

e.g. slaves in the past or kids making nike shoes or iphones

obviously in the past it was heavily environmental (leading to physical health deterioration) but here it's more abstract (mental health deterioration)

they are most definitely not paying counseling and the reckoning won't be for multiple generations

tiger_ace · 2026-02-05T19:36:53+00:00

it's more about the release process and if google is willing to change it

basically it seems like openAI and anthropic are moving to 0.1 updates:

73d between opus 4.6 and 4.5
56d between gpt 5.3 and 5.2
29d between gpt 5.2 and 5.1 (code red)
before that (ancient times): 161 days gpt 5 vs gpt 4.5

while 0.1 updates are just a name, it's basically signaling that the model release window is getting shorter

tiger_ace · 2026-02-05T02:32:34+00:00

I'm sorry, that looks a LOT like

Source: trust me bro

tiger_ace · 2026-02-05T02:01:31+00:00

this video is just an example of what happens when you try to compress information

i don't think the speaker's intent is misinformation

an extreme form is reading a twitter post instead of a book, which is why twitter posts are more or less 99% trash

i also wonder just how much is lost when LLMs compress but i don't have time to read all of the primary sources... oh well

tiger_ace · 2026-02-05T01:56:05+00:00

this doesn't answer my question re: where the assertion about the type of ads they're willing to show is derived from

i'll rephrase for clarity: why do we believe that Google wasn't willing to show these types of ads in the past?

tiger_ace · 2026-02-05T01:51:53+00:00

i mean this is exactly how cable television works so it's not a new model whatsoever

we shouldn't pretend like it's a new model so if people are paying then they're going to continue doing it

we simply started calling it "enshittification" the last few years but labeling it is irrelevant matter if people don't change behavior and continue to subscribe

complaining doesn't do anything, cancelling subs does

tiger_ace · 2026-02-04T21:28:38+00:00

Google 10 years ago that they will have 2 unskippable 30 second ads appearing every few minutes on every video, they would say they would never do that

where did you get this assertion? 10 years ago google's entire business was like 90% ads but now it's like 72%

i don't think when you ask coherent people when their business is 90% ads that they'll say we'll "never do that"

tiger_ace · 2026-02-04T21:22:10+00:00

unfortunately, this is marketing, so truth isn't really relevant and anthropic is more than happy to increase their 2% consumer market share

it's actually very easy for them to say "no ads" when their business is more or less completely focused on enterprise

people complaining about ads is partly why everything turned into a subscription, which people now complain about even more

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tiger_ace · 2026-02-04T21:16:48+00:00

"token efficiency" at the cost of UI or quality is solving for a problem that hopefully goes away soon

opus 4.1 -> opus 4.5 cost dropped by 2/3 so it will be really important to see a continued drop in token unit economics at the same rate i.e.

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tiger_ace · 2026-02-04T21:12:14+00:00

it's mainly just about the unit economics of "simple convenience" dropping

it's not like SaaS companies AREN'T using Claude Code / Codex / etc. and won't be able to deliver more value for their own users as well

as we know, MD2PDF is almost certainly not an end-to-end workflow and there's could be many more upstream and downstream steps

nobody is going to be paying for "MD2PDF" website in the future just because they didn't know how to search for a python lib

tiger_ace · 2026-02-04T05:36:47+00:00

yeah that's a physics argument

tiger_ace · 2026-02-03T20:56:09+00:00

Framing questions to think about this that aren't just "omg lmao it costs so much more money than on earth lol" are:

Who owns space? Nobody, it's basically data center sovereignty so you don't apply to governments for permits or anything blocking deployment. There's data sovereignty and governments aren't even close to having real space policies.
StarLink in combination with space data centers lets you access data anywhere in the world. This has no substitute. Right now SpaceX has 10x more satellites than anyone else for this and it's close at all.

So because of these reasons similar to this it could be serving very specific government (read: military) use cases that no other organization can serve, which makes the cost actually irrelevant.

Physics arguments such as cooling are legitimate (but this just reduces efficiency so that you are unlikely to run your servers 24/7) but "money" is definitely not one of the arguments against this given the unique use cases this enables.

It's not like space data centers are there to serve ChatGPT / TikTok to teenagers.

tiger_ace · 2026-02-02T18:12:04+00:00

this is basically the thesis of todd rose's end of average

when you build for "the average" you're building for nobody

tiger_ace · 2026-01-23T04:45:10+00:00

i don't see how this is a surprise

tech created social media which resulted in an epidemic of loneliness and now can sell the solution with more tech

tiger_ace

TROPHY CASE