Roboflow
Google

Google: Gemini 3 Flash

Gemini 3 Flash Overview

Gemini 3 Flash is a proprietary multimodal large language model developed by Google through Google DeepMind, designed to deliver fast, cost-efficient reasoning across real-time products and developer workflows. Released in December 2025, it is the Flash-tier variant of the Gemini 3 family, balancing low latency with reasoning quality approaching Pro models.

The model supports text, images, audio, and video, with an exceptionally large context window of roughly one million input tokens and outputs up to ~65k tokens. It emphasizes rapid responses for coding, summarization, analysis, and agentic tasks, and exposes configurable “thinking levels” via API to trade speed for deeper reasoning. Today, Gemini 3 Flash positions itself as a high-throughput, production-ready model, serving as the default in the Gemini app and Google Search’s AI Mode, optimized for scalable, interactive AI applications.

Gemini 3 Flash Interactive Demo

Gemini 3 Flash Details & Performance

Details

Resources

Vision Tasks

Vision LanguageObject DetectionClassificationOCRVisual Question AnsweringCaptioning

Features

Foundation VisionLLMs with Vision CapabilitiesMultimodal Vision

Usage

Past 30 Days

Performance

Avg. Latency

Arena Rankings

Gemini 3 Flash Vision Evals

Vision Evals is Roboflow's ground-truth benchmark: every model runs the same real-world samples across six vision tasks, and answers are scored against ground truth.

Evals updated July 10, 2026Pricing updated July 21, 2026

Overall score#4 of 16
77.2%
Avg cost / sample#3 of 16
$0.0017
Avg speed / sample#1 of 16
3.9s
Avg tokens / sample
1.5K

Strengths and weaknesses

Gemini 3 Flash averages 77.2% across the six Vision Evals tasks, ranking #4 of 16 models overall.

It leads the field in Data Extraction.

Its weakest relative showing is OCR, ranking #15 of 16 at 87.6%.

At $0.0017 per sample it is the 3rd cheapest of the 16 benchmarked models, and its average inference time of 3.9s per sample makes it the fastest.

Performance profile

Field medianGemini 3 Flash

Field medians: Object Detection 41.5%, Counting 62.2%, Identification 84.4%, OCR 89.1%, Data Extraction 85.6%, Reasoning 76.1%.

Results by task

TaskScoreField (0 to 100)RankCost / sampleSpeed
Object Detection
39.3%
#10 of 16$0.00225.1s
Counting
67.6%
#4 of 16$0.00122.9s
Identification
93.8%
#4 of 16$0.00092.2s
OCR
87.6%
#15 of 16$0.00244.2s
Data Extraction
96.9%
#1 of 16$0.00082.0s
Reasoning
78.3%
#7 of 16$0.00173.6s

Price vs. performance

Score vs. cost

Overall benchmark score against estimated cost per sample. Upper-left is the sweet spot: high quality at low cost.

16 models on the current benchmark · scores and efficiency pooled across all six tasks · Gemini 3 Flash highlighted

Gemini 3 Flash scores from a single evaluation run · Methodology

View all Vision Evals →

Gemini 3 Flash Pricing

Gemini 3 Flash costs $0.500 per 1M input tokens and $3.00 per 1M output tokens.

Input$0.500 / 1M tokens
Output$3.00 / 1M tokens
Cached input$0.050 / 1M tokens

Pricing updated Jul 21, 2026

Alternatives to Gemini 3 Flash

Other models worth comparing for similar use cases.

Google
Gemma 4 26B A4B
Gemma 4 26B A4B is the Mixture-of-Experts variant in Google's Gemma 4 family, with 25.2B total parameters but only 3.8B active per token. Built from the same Gemini 3 research as the 31B dense sibling and released as open weights under the Apache 2.0 license, it supports a 256K token context window with text and image input and configurable thinking mode. The "A4B" in the name refers to its approximately 4B active parameters. The MoE design makes it significantly faster at inference than the dense 31B, running nearly as fast as a 4B-parameter model while delivering roughly 97% of the dense model's quality.For vision tasks, the 26B A4B shares the same multimodal capabilities as the 31B image understanding with variable aspect ratios and resolutions, and structured bounding box output for UI element detection. The tradeoff versus the 31B dense model is a small quality reduction in exchange for much faster inference and lower hardware requirements, fitting in 18GB of VRAM at 4-bit quantization. It ranked #6 among open models on the Arena AI text leaderboard at launch.
Google
Gemma 4 31B
Gemma 4 31B is the largest dense model in Google's Gemma 4 family, built from the same research as Gemini 3 and released as open weights under the Apache 2.0 license. It supports a 256K token context window with text and image input, configurable thinking mode for step-by-step reasoning, and multilingual support across 140+ languages. The unquantized model fits on a single 80GB GPU.For vision tasks, Gemma 4 31B supports image understanding with variable aspect ratios and resolutions, and can output structured bounding boxes for UI element detection, making it useful for document parsing and UI understanding. Compared to Gemma 3, it delivers stronger reasoning and multimodal performance. It is part of a four-size family alongside the 26B A4B MoE variant and two on-device models (E2B, E4B), with the 31B dense variant optimized for output quality and fine-tuning over inference speed.
OpenAI
GPT-5 Mini
GPT-5 Mini, released by OpenAI on August 7, 2025, is a mid-tier variant of the GPT-5 family that balances cost, speed, and capability. It is multimodal, supporting both text and image inputs, and offers a substantial input context window of ~400,000 tokens with output lengths up to ~128,000 tokens. While less powerful than the full GPT-5, it inherits its safety tuning, instruction-following improvements, and multimodal reasoning, making it a practical choice for developers who need large context handling without the expense of premium models.GPT-5 Mini is optimized for affordability while retaining strong reasoning performance. Benchmarks show it outperforming earlier models such as GPT-4o on many multimodal and medical VQA tasks, though it lags behind GPT-5 on the most complex problems. Ideal use cases include prototyping, scalable content generation, document analysis, and mid-range reasoning tasks where efficiency and context capacity matter more than top-tier accuracy.
Anthropic
Claude Sonnet 5
Claude Sonnet 5 is a mid-tier large language model from Anthropic, released on June 30, 2026, as the latest model in the Sonnet series and a direct successor to Claude Sonnet 4.6. It is a hybrid reasoning model designed primarily for agentic workflows, software coding, and professional tasks. The model features a 1 million token context window, a 128k maximum output token limit, and runs adaptive thinking by default, giving API users fine-grained control over reasoning effort across five levels (low, medium, high, max, and extra-high). It uses an updated tokenizer shared with Opus 4.7 and later models, which produces approximately 30% more tokens for equivalent text compared to earlier Claude models. On benchmarks, Sonnet 5 scores 63.2% on agentic coding and 81.2% on OSWorld, narrowing the gap with Opus 4.8 while remaining at Sonnet-tier pricing.The model supports text and image input with text output, and accepts tools including browsers and terminals for autonomous multi-step task execution. Anthropic's safety evaluations report that Sonnet 5 shows a lower rate of undesirable behaviors than Sonnet 4.6 and is generally safer in agentic contexts, with improved resistance to prompt injection and reduced sycophancy. Cybersecurity safeguards equivalent to those on Opus 4.7 and 4.8 are active, though Anthropic notes the model was not deliberately trained on cybersecurity tasks. The model is proprietary and API-only, with no open weights.
Qwen
Qwen3.6 35B A3B
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) multimodal language model developed by the Qwen team at Alibaba Group. It carries 35 billion total parameters but activates only approximately 3 billion per forward pass via a learned routing mechanism, giving it the representational capacity of a large dense model at a fraction of the inference compute. The model is natively multimodal, processing images, documents, and video alongside text as a core architectural capability rather than an add-on. It supports a native context window of 262,144 tokens, extensible up to 1,010,000 tokens via YaRN. A key design feature is the unified thinking/non-thinking mode framework: users can switch between deliberate chain-of-thought reasoning and fast direct responses within a single model, and a "thinking preservation" option retains reasoning context across multi-turn agentic workflows to reduce redundant computation.The model is specifically optimized for agentic coding tasks, including repository-level reasoning, frontend workflow generation, multi-step tool use, and MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration. On SWE-bench Verified it scores 73.4%, on Terminal-Bench 2.0 it scores 51.5%, and on MCPMark it scores 37.0%. For vision-language tasks it achieves 92.0 on RefCOCO, 89.9 on OmniDocBench 1.5, and 83.7 on VideoMMMU. The model also supports Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) for speculative decoding. All Qwen3.6 open-weight models are released under the Apache 2.0 license.

Other Google Gemini Flash models

Other versions in the same family as Gemini 3 Flash.

Gemini 3 Flash License

Proprietary

License terms and commercial-use guidance for Gemini 3 Flash.

This model is proprietary. The author retains all rights, and use of the model is governed by their specific terms of service or license agreement.

Commercial use depends on the terms set by the model author. Most proprietary commercial models require a paid subscription, API key, or per-call billing. Check the provider’s pricing and terms-of-service for details.

License information is provided as a guide and is not legal advice.

Frequently Asked Questions About Gemini 3 Flash Vision

Yes. Gemini 3 Flash accepts image input and handles OCR, data extraction, object counting, identification, visual reasoning, and object detection. On Roboflow's Vision Evals its strongest task is Data Extraction at 96.9% (#1 of 16). You can test it on your own image in the demo above.

Yes. its transcriptions match the ground truth 87.6% on average (#15 of 16) on Vision Evals OCR. Pulling specific fields out of documents (data extraction) scores 96.9%.

Not its strength. On Vision Evals, Gemini 3 Flash scores 39.3% mAP@50 on object detection (#10 of 16) and 67.6% exact-match accuracy on object counting. For production counting or precise localization, pairing it with a specialized detector like RF-DETR or your own trained model in a Roboflow Workflow is usually more reliable: detect the objects, then count the detections.

On our benchmark's task mix, Gemini 3 Flash averages $0.0017 per sample at $0.50 per 1M input and $3.00 per 1M output tokens (#3 of 16 on cost), with an average speed of 3.9s per sample across the benchmark. Actual cost depends on your images and prompts.

On the overall Vision Evals ranking, Gemini 3 Flash sits #4 of 16 at 77.2%, just behind Claude Fable 5 (79.6%) and just ahead of GPT-5.6 Sol (74.6%). See the full side-by-side: Gemini 3 Flash vs Claude Fable 5.