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Gemini 3.6 Flash vs SAM 3

Compare Gemini 3.6 Flash and SAM 3 side-by-side. See how these vision models stack up in Object Detection.

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GoogleGemini 3.6 Flash
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MetaSAM 3
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Models in this comparison

Meta

Gemini 3.6 Flash vs SAM 3 Comparison Table

Evals updated October 8, 2026Pricing updated October 9, 2026

PropertyGemini 3.6 FlashSAM 3
OrganizationGoogleMeta
Categoryclosedopen
Modalitymultimodalmultimodal
Release DateJul 2026Nov 2025
Context Window1.0M—
ParametersUnknownUnknown
LicenseProprietaryCustom
Pricing per 1M tokens
Input $/1M$0.750No published price
Output $/1M$3.75No published price
Vision Tasks
Object DetectionDemoDemo
CaptioningDemoNot listed
Chart Question AnsweringSupportedNot listed
ClassificationDemoNot listed
Document Question AnsweringSupportedNot listed
Image TaggingSupportedNot listed
Instance SegmentationNot listedSupported
Multi-Label ClassificationSupportedNot listed
OCRDemoNot listed
Open Vocabulary Object DetectionNot listedSupported
Promptable Concept SegmentationNot listedDemo
Video ClassificationSupportedNot listed
Video Object TrackingNot listedSupported
Vision LanguageSupportedNot listed
Visual Question AnsweringDemoNot listed
Zero Shot SegmentationNot listedSupported
Model Features
Foundation VisionSupportedSupported
Multimodal VisionSupportedSupported
LLMs with Vision CapabilitiesSupportedNot listed
Zero-shot DetectionNot listedSupported
Vision Evalsground-truth scores across 5 vision tasks, pooled at low effort
Overall
77.1%
Not evaluated
Avg cost / sample$0.0033–
Avg speed / sample10.43s–
By task
Object Detection (low)
57.1%
±1.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 55.9 to 59.4
$0.0041
–
Object Detection (high)
70.7%
±0.4, Mean of 3 runs, range 70.3 to 71.2
$0.0093
–
Counting (low)
80.2%
±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 78.4 to 82.4
$0.0034
–
Counting (high)
79.3%
±2.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 77.0 to 82.4
$0.0089
–
Identification (low)
99.0%
±1.6, Mean of 3 runs, range 96.9 to 100.0
$0.0015
–
Identification (high)
100.0%
±0.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 100.0 to 100.0
$0.0033
–
OCR (low)
71.8%
$0.0030
–
by category
Single value
68.3%
Transcription
89.4%
Structured JSON
82.9%
Text localization
42.5%
OCR (high)
77.4%
$0.014
–
by category
Single value
68.7%
Transcription
90.3%
Structured JSON
89.3%
Text localization
62.1%
Reasoning (low)
77.7%
±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 76.2 to 80.1
$0.0031
–
Reasoning (high)
81.0%
±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 79.5 to 83.4
$0.0091
–

Gemini 3.6 Flash vs SAM 3: Overview

Gemini 3.6 Flash

Gemini 3.6 Flash is a multimodal language model from Google DeepMind, positioned as the workhorse tier in the Gemini 3.x family. It accepts text, image, video, audio, and PDF inputs with a 1 million token context window and produces up to 64,000 output tokens. The model builds directly on Gemini 3.5 Flash, incorporating developer and customer feedback to improve token efficiency, coding quality, and knowledge work performance. According to the Artificial Analysis Index, it consumes 17% fewer output tokens than its predecessor, and on some benchmarks such as DeepSWE, token reduction reaches up to 65%. It supports function calling, structured output, search as a tool, and code execution, and includes computer use as a built-in capability in the Gemini API and Gemini Enterprise.

On coding benchmarks, Gemini 3.6 Flash scores 49% on DeepSWE versus 37% for 3.5 Flash, and 63.9% on MLE Bench versus 49.7%. Computer use performance on OSWorld-Verified improves from 78.4% to 83%, and knowledge work scores on GDPval-AA v2 rise from 1349 to 1421. The model carries a knowledge cutoff of March 2026 and ships with enhanced Frontier Safety safeguards covering chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and cyber offense domains, with training to minimize refusals for beneficial uses. It is a proprietary, closed-weights model available in preview through the Gemini API via Google AI Studio, Android Studio, Google Antigravity, Gemini Enterprise, and the Gemini app.

SAM 3

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.

Frequently Asked Questions

SAM 3 has not yet been evaluated on Roboflow's current Vision Evals, so this comparison shows specs, licensing, and pricing rather than benchmark scores.

Gemini 3.6 Flash is released under Proprietary, while SAM 3 uses Custom. Licensing often matters more than raw accuracy for commercial deployments, so check the terms against how you plan to ship.

Yes. The comparison demo on this page runs both models on the same image side by side for object detection in the free Roboflow Playground. You can try it instantly, and a free account unlocks unlimited runs.