Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite vs SAM 3

Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite is a natively multimodal reasoning model from Google DeepMind in the Gemini 3 series, based on the Gemini 3 Pro architecture. It processes text, image, video, audio, and PDF inputs within a 1 million token context window and produces text output up to 64K tokens. The model targets high-volume, latency-sensitive workloads and supports visual question answering, image and document data extraction, content moderation, classification, translation, automated speech recognition, and agentic data pipelines. It exposes configurable thinking levels of minimal, low, medium, and high, which set the depth of internal reasoning applied per request and let developers balance response quality against cost and latency.

On benchmarks reported at launch, Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite scores 86.9% on GPQA Diamond and 76.8% on the MMMU Pro multimodal benchmark, and reaches an Elo score of 1432 on the Arena.ai leaderboard. According to Artificial Analysis benchmarks, it produces a 2.5 times faster time to first answer token and a 45% increase in output speed relative to Gemini 2.5 Flash. It also shows improved instruction following, higher audio input quality for automated speech recognition tasks, and support for structured JSON output used in data extraction pipelines.

Released on November 19th, 2025, Segment Anything 3 (SAM 3) is a zero-shot image segmentation model that “detects, segments, and tracks objects in images and videos based on concept prompts.” This model was developed by Meta as the third model in the Segment Anything series.

Unlike its previous SAM models (Segment Anything and Segment Anything 2), you can provide SAM 3 with the prompt “shipping container” and it will generate precise segmentation masks for all shipping containers in an image. SAM 3 generates segmentation masks that correspond to the location of the objects found with a text prompt.