Gemini Made Crystal Clear · chapter 2: Which AI, and Which Gemini
Where Gemini sits, dated
2026-09-28
On Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index (fetched September 3, 2026), Gemini 3.8 Flash scores lowest of the three flagships shown, and is also the cheapest and fastest by a wide margin. On Arena's Text Arena (snapshot September 2, 2026), Google's best settled score ranks 15th, with two newer, higher-ranking entries still preliminary.
Below: the paragraph from the book that builds this idea, then the diagram itself (Figure 2.2), and a recap. About a minute of reading.
Read the rest of the row, and the picture changes. Gemini 3.8 Flash's price is $0.58 per 1M tokens, blended, the cheapest of the three. Its speed is 302 tokens per second, more than four times GPT's 70 tokens per second and more than four and a half times Claude's 66 tokens per second at their respective top scores. Gemini is not the smartest model on this board. It is the cheapest and the fastest of the three flagships compared, by a wide margin, at a real but modest gap in intelligence score. That is a genuine, useful position for a vendor to hold, and it is a different claim from "the best," which is exactly why this book states it this way instead of rounding it up.
Recap
- The idea: On Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index (fetched September 3, 2026), Gemini 3.8 Flash scores lowest of the three flagships shown, and is also the cheapest and fastest by a wide margin.
- The picture: Figure 2.2, from chapter 2 ("Which AI, and Which Gemini") of Gemini Made Crystal Clear.
- Go deeper: the chapter builds this step by step, with recipes and sources at the end.
This diagram is one of many in Gemini Made Crystal Clear.
Every chapter opens with the gist, draws the hard ideas, and ends with recipes and sources.
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