Google’s answer to a summer of being outrun is not a bigger model. It is cheaper ones.
On Tuesday the company launched three new Gemini models, all at its fast, low-cost “Flash” tier, a day before Alphabet reports earnings. The message is efficiency over raw power. The catch is what is still missing.
Cheap, fast, and everywhere but the top
The workhorse is Gemini 3.6 Flash. Google says it does better coding and knowledge work than its predecessor while using about 17% fewer output tokens, and it costs less. That is $7.50 per million output tokens, down from $9. Its knowledge now runs to March 2026.
Alongside it sits 3.5 Flash-Lite, the fastest of the family at 350 tokens a second, and cheaper still. Both lean into one bet: that most AI work does not need a frontier brain, just a quick, affordable one.
