Google Launches Gemini 3 Flash: Default AI Model for Search and Gemini

Google has officially launched Gemini 3 Flash, a faster and more cost efficient version of its Gemini 3 large language model, and is making it the default AI model across the Gemini app and Google Search’s AI Mode worldwide. 

Built on the same foundation as Gemini 3 Pro, Gemini 3 Flash is designed to deliver strong reasoning and multimodal performance while prioritizing speed, lower latency, and affordability. The release comes six months after Gemini 2.5 Flash and reflects Google’s push to compete more aggressively with OpenAI amid intensifying competition in consumer and enterprise AI tools (TechCrunch; Yahoo Tech).

Performance benchmarks show significant gains over previous Flash models. Gemini 3 Flash scored 33.7 percent on Humanity’s Last Exam without tool use, a benchmark designed to measure expertise across diverse domains. This places it close to Gemini 3 Pro at 37.5 percent and slightly below OpenAI’s GPT 5.2 at 34.5 percent, while far surpassing Gemini 2.5 Flash’s 11 percent score. On the MMMU Pro multimodality and reasoning benchmark, Gemini 3 Flash led all competitors with an 81.2 percent score. Google also reported strong results on PhD level reasoning benchmarks such as GPQA Diamond, where the model achieved a 90.4 percent score, demonstrating that efficiency gains have not come at the cost of core intelligence (TechCrunch; SiliconANGLE).

For consumers, Gemini 3 Flash is now the default model in the Gemini app globally, replacing Gemini 2.5 Flash at no cost to users. While the Pro model remains available for math and coding focused tasks, Flash is positioned as a general purpose workhorse. The model excels at multimodal interactions, allowing users to upload videos, images, sketches, or audio and receive contextual responses. Examples include analyzing short sports clips for tips, interpreting hand drawn sketches, or turning audio recordings into summaries or quizzes. Gemini 3 Flash also supports visual answers that incorporate tables and images and can generate basic app prototypes directly from prompts, lowering the barrier to application creation for non technical users (Yahoo Tech; SiliconANGLE).

Gemini 3 Flash is also becoming the default engine behind Google Search’s AI Mode, which provides AI generated summaries in response to queries. According to Google executives, the model’s improved understanding of user intent allows it to produce faster, more accurate, and more actionable summaries based on real time information rather than static content. This integration is intended to combine research and decision making in a single step, helping users move from discovery to action more quickly (SiliconANGLE).

On the enterprise and developer side, Gemini 3 Flash is available through Vertex AI, Gemini Enterprise, Google AI Studio, the Gemini CLI, and Google Antigravity, a new agent driven development environment. Companies including JetBrains, Figma, Cursor, Harvey, Latitude, and Box are already using the model. Google positions Flash as ideal for agentic workflows, customer support systems, interactive applications, video analysis, data extraction, and visual question answering. Compared to Gemini 2.5 Pro, the model delivers responses up to three times faster while using about 30 percent fewer tokens for thinking tasks, which can reduce overall costs in production environments (TechCrunch; SiliconANGLE).

Pricing further reinforces this positioning. Gemini 3 Flash costs $0.50 per one million input tokens and $3.00 per one million output tokens, slightly higher than Gemini 2.5 Flash but significantly cheaper than Pro models while delivering stronger performance. Google also offers standard context caching, enabling cost reductions of up to 90 percent for applications with repeated token usage. Since the release of Gemini 3, Google reports processing more than one trillion tokens per day through its API, highlighting rapid adoption. While Google has not directly addressed its rivalry with OpenAI, executives acknowledge that rapid model releases and new benchmarks are pushing the entire industry forward at an unprecedented pace (TechCrunch).

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Works Cited

TechCrunch. “Google Launches Gemini 3 Flash, Makes It the Default Model in the Gemini App.” TechCrunch, 17 Dec. 2025, https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/17/google-launches-gemini-3-flash-makes-it-the-default-model-in-the-gemini-app/.

Yahoo Tech. “Google Launches Gemini 3 Flash, Makes It the Default Model in the Gemini App.” Yahoo Tech, 17 Dec. 2025, https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/gemini/articles/google-launches-gemini-3-flash-160000864.html.

SiliconANGLE. “Google’s Gemini 3 Flash Makes Big Splash with Faster Responsiveness and Superior Reasoning.” SiliconANGLE, 17 Dec. 2025, https://siliconangle.com/2025/12/17/googles-gemini-3-flash-makes-big-splash-faster-responsiveness-superior-reasoning/.

Stein, Robby. “Gemini 3 Flash is Rolling Out Globally in Google Search.” The Keyword, Google, 17 Dec. 2025, https://blog.google/products/search/google-ai-mode-update-gemini-3-flash/.