Google says Flash beat Pro on benchmarks. The pricing page says Flash became Pro. Input price up 15x, output up 22.5x in three generations. The numbers tell a different story than the keynote.
Gemini 3.5 "Flash" Costs 15x More Than Flash 2.0 — It's Pro in Disguise
Google I/O 2026 Review — Part 1 of 5
The keynote crowd cheered. Sundar Pichai announced that Gemini 3.5 Flash outperforms Gemini 3.1 Pro on multiple benchmarks. The narrative was clean: the lightweight, cheap model just beat the flagship. The start of "the agentic Gemini era."
Then I opened the pricing page.
Flash and Pro Are Neighbors Now
Google releases Gemini 3.5 Flash at I/O 2026, outperforming Gemini 3.1 Pro on coding and agentic benchmarks at 4x the speed.
Google today, at I/O 2026, unveiled Gemini 3.5 Flash, claiming it "rivals flagship models to deliver frontier performance for…
Google's Gemini 3.5 Flash is a big step up from its predecessor, but in benchmark testing, it costs 5.5 times as much to run. On…
Today at Google I/O, Google released Gemini 3.5 Flash. This one skipped the -preview modifier and went straight to general…
Google didn’t reveal a lot of information about its Gemini 3 Flash model. So we had to speculate a lot on what is going on under…
Google unveils Gemini 3.5 Flash at I/O 2026, saying the new AI model is faster, cheaper and smarter than its predecessor and…
