Soon after the launch of Gemini Pro, Google on December 17 released the new Gemini 3 Flash model, which will also become the default AI model on the Gemini app. The tech giant now allows free users to ask limited queries to its reasoning model, while leaving the rest of the queries to the non-reasoning model, which is denoted as ‘Fast’ in the Gemini application.
“Gemini 3 Flash demonstrates that speed and scale don’t have to come at the cost of intelligence. It delivers frontier performance on PhD-level reasoning and knowledge benchmarks like GPQA Diamond (90.4%) and Humanity’s Last Exam (33.7% without tools), rivaling larger frontier models, and significantly outperforming even the best 2.5 model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, across a number of benchmarks,” Google said in a blog post.
Gemini 3: What’s New
The new model is said to be three times faster than the Gemini 2.5 Pro model on the artificial analysis benchmark, while it runs at a fraction of the cost. Gemini 2.5 Pro had remained among the top-ranking models across benchmarks for months until Google released three Pro models last month.
The Gemini 3 was able to fetch a score of 33%, which is higher than the scores of Grok 4.1 Fast and Claude Sonnet, while being just below GPT-5.3.
In the ARC-AGI-2 benchmark for visual reasoning-related tasks, Gemini 3 Flash outperformed not just Claude and Gemini 2.5 Pro, but even the latest Gemini 3 Pro model.
How to Use Gemini 3 Flash
Gemini 3 Flash is already the default model in Gemini, and users do not have to pay extra to use it. The model powers AI mode in Search, which allows users to ask questions in a conversational style, much like Perplexity.
