Gemini 3.8 Flash
Gemini 3.8 Flash
Google's smartest Flash yet, eighth on the arena, and still free to start on.
Updated
The read
Gemini 3.8 Flash went generally available on 2 September and replaced the short-lived 3.7 Flash within weeks. It reads text, images, video, audio and PDFs, takes a million tokens of context, and sits eighth on the arena leaderboard, ahead of many full-price flagships. The free tier covers it, and the paid price is introductory until the end of the year, when it doubles. Its benchmark scores trail its human-preference rating, which is worth knowing before you trust it with long agent work.
Where it shines
- Eighth on the arena leaderboard at Flash prices
- Native video, audio and PDF input
- The free tier covers it, so prototyping costs nothing
Worth knowing first
- The paid price doubles on 1 January 2027
- Weaker on long agentic terminal work than its arena rank suggests
Index score
87.9
Provisional. This score is read from the product's public capability, not from the one-prompt rebuild the fully reviewed entries went through, so treat it as a placing rather than a verdict.
- Rank
- 09 of 73
- Builds
- LLMs
- Category
- Frontier
- Output
- Text, images, video, audio and PDFs in, text out
- Pricing
- Free tier
- Best for
- Multimodal product work that needs to be quick and cheap
Scores are our own editorial judgement, weighted craft 55, speed 10, control 15 and value 20.
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