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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 August 6, 2026Pricing updated August 10, 2026

PropertyGemini 3.6 FlashSAM 3
OrganizationGoogleMeta
Categoryclosedopen
Modalitymultimodalmultimodal
Release DateJul 2026Nov 2025
Context Window1.0M
Parameters
LicenseProprietaryCustom
Pricing per 1M tokens
Input $/1M$1.50
Output $/1M$7.50
Vision Tasks
Object DetectionDemoDemo
CaptioningDemo
Chart Question Answering
ClassificationDemo
Document Question Answering
Image Tagging
Instance Segmentation
Multi-Label Classification
OCRDemo
Open Vocabulary Object Detection
Promptable Concept SegmentationDemo
Video Classification
Video Object Tracking
Vision Language
Visual Question AnsweringDemo
Zero Shot Segmentation
Model Features
Foundation Vision
Multimodal Vision
LLMs with Vision Capabilities
Zero-shot Detection
Vision Evalsground-truth scores across 6 vision tasks, pooled at low effort
Overall
83.1%
Not evaluated
Avg cost / sample$0.0063
Avg speed / sample4.73s
By task
Object Detection
56.0%
$0.0083
Counting
82.4%
$0.0065
Identification
96.9%
$0.0030
OCR
88.4%
$0.0050
Data Extraction
94.8%
$0.0030
Reasoning (low)
80.1%
$0.0062
Reasoning (high)
80.1%
$0.017

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.