Google’s third Flash model in six weeks delivers strong coding benchmarks and a cybersecurity twin — yet Meta’s same-day release outperforms it on independent intelligence metrics.
Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash on September 2, marking its third Flash-tier model in six weeks following 3.6 and 3.7 Flash . Google CEO Sundar Pichai highlighted “significant leaps” in software engineering, agentic tasks, and multi-step reasoning, with the model outperforming larger frontier models on the DeepSWE coding benchmark at far lower cost .
The model is priced at $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens — identical to 3.7 Flash — and supports a 1-million-token context window . Google simultaneously launched Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, a security-specialized variant achieving 86.2% on CyberGym and a 70%+ vulnerability detection success rate across 20 programming languages, available only through the invite-only Fairwind Program .
However, the same-day release of Meta’s Muse Spark 1.3 overshadowed Google’s launch. Independent evaluator Artificial Analysis scored Muse Spark 1.3 at 62 on its Intelligence Index, placing it in a tie for third globally, while Gemini 3.8 Flash received 59 . Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexander Wang taunted Google on X, writing: “I don’t want to say this, but… Gemini who?”
