Gemini 3.8 Flash is Google’s third budget model in six weeks while frontier models remain MIA

Three weeks after Gemini 3.7 Flash, Google is back with Gemini 3.8 Flash. The budget model is supposed to beat its predecessor by a wide margin in coding.

Google is releasing Gemini 3.8 Flash in two versions: a general-purpose reasoning and coding model and a specialized cybersecurity version called 3.8 Flash Cyber. This is the third Flash release in just six weeks, and whether that rapid cadence is a sign of strength or a distraction from the still-missing frontier models Gemini 3.5 Pro and Gemini 4 depends on who you ask. New Deepmind head Koray Kavukcuoglu made it clear that Google isn’t just chasing price-performance optimization and still wants to lead on raw capability too. According to Google’s own numbers, Gemini 3.8 Flash hits 73.7 percent on the DeepSWE v1.1 benchmark for long-horizon software engineering tasks. That’s just below Claude Opus 5 at 74.0 percent but well ahead of Claude Sonnet 5 (53.8%), GPT-5.6 Sol (72.7%), and the previous 3.7 Flash (65.3%).Ad Google also says the new model has improved at 3D generation. The video below shows a 3D game that Gemini 3.8 Flash reportedly built from a single prompt in Google’s AI coding tool Antigravity. The textures were generated with Google’s Nano Banana image model.Ad Gemini 3.8 Flash launches at a reduced price of $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens, matching 3.7 Flash. Starting January 2027, the regular price will rise to $1.50 and $7.50. Claude Opus 5 costs $5.00 per million input tokens and $25.00 for output tokens, while GPT-5.6 Sol sits at $4.00 and $20.00. Even after the introductory pricing expires, Gemini 3.8 Flash would remain far cheaper on a per-token basis than the top models from OpenAI and Anthropic. But Google explains the performance gains over 3.7 partly by saying that 3.8 Flash runs extra reasoning steps on complex tasks and calls tools iteratively. The model “works harder,” Google says, which means higher token consumption that partly offsets the lower per-token price. For use cases where compute efficiency matters most, Google recommends lower reasoning levels or sticking with the still-supported 3.7 Flash.Ad Independent benchmarking platform Artificial Analysis gives Gemini 3.8 Flash an Intelligence Index score of 59, three points above its predecessor 3.7 Flash at 56. TThat puts it on par with GPT-5.6 Sol at xhigh reasoning and Grok 4.6 at medium reasoning, both also scoring 59. The Intelligence Index gains come mainly from stronger performance on agentic benchmarks like tool use and coding tasks, according to Artificial Analysis.Ad On cost per task, 3.8 Flash hits the Pareto frontier according to Artificial Analysis, coming in at $0.58 per task as the cheapest model at its intelligence level.