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FrontierThe story, in brief

Google's Gemini 3.5 Flash follows Anthropic and OpenAI in making newer AI models significantly pricier

5.5X cost increase. Google's Gemini 3.5 Flash shows the hidden price of AI progress—and it's not just Google.

Reporting by The Decoder 1 min brief
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The KeyNews take

Why it matters

As AI models improve, inference costs are rising sharply across providers. This challenges the unit economics of AI products and forces founders/investors to rethink pricing strategies and margin assumptions.

The key facts

4 to know

  1. Gemini 3.5 Flash costs 5.5x more than predecessor in benchmark testing

  2. On agent tasks, Gemini 3.5 Flash costs 75% more than Gemini 3.1 Pro

  3. Model requires more interaction steps than rival models tested

  4. Pricing increases observed across Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google

Go to the source

The Decoderthe-decoder.com

Publisher excerpt: 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 agent tasks, total costs even exceed the pricier Gemini 3.1 Pro by 75 percent because the model needs more interaction steps than any rival tested. Google isn't alone…
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