Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

(blog.google)

50 points | by swolpers 1 hour ago

5 comments

  • mlmonkey 59 minutes ago
    It's funny how in their own graph, https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ima... Gemini 3.5 Flash is beat hands down by both Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5, and yet the graph is drawn as if Gemini wins ... :-D
    • mroche 36 minutes ago
      The graph has Gemini 3.5 Flash matching Sonnet 4.6, losing to Opus 4.8, and slightly behind GPT-5.5 by 0.3 points... That's not that much of a hands-down loss for Gemini for this specific workload benchmark.

      The methodology used:

      https://deepmind.google/models/evals-methodology/gemini-3-5-...

      Methodology: All Gemini scores are pass @1 except where otherwise noted. "Single attempt" settings allow no majority voting or parallel test-time compute. All of the results are all run with the Gemini API for the model-id gemini-3.5-flash with default sampling settings unless indicated otherwise below. To reduce variance, we average over multiple trials for smaller benchmarks.

      All the results for non-Gemini models are sourced from providers' self reported numbers unless otherwise mentioned below. For Claude Opus 4.7 , Sonnet 4.6, and GPT-5.5 we default to reporting maximum thinking/reasoning settings available, but when reported results are not available we use best available reasoning results.

    • gb2d_hn 26 minutes ago
      It's honest - people who know what they are looking at will take speed and token costs into account. I don't use Gemini 3.5 for coding, but I use it as something in between a search engine and agent.
    • sheept 54 minutes ago
      It highlights the Gemini models blue since that's what the article is about. The bar heights seem consistent with the values.
    • data-ottawa 15 minutes ago
      I think 3.5 flash is trying to target agentic work, like Google Search or ADK (agent development kit) use cases.

      It’s something cheap enough you’d put out in front of your customers, and Opus is expensive enough you wouldn’t.

  • airstrike 1 hour ago
    Computer use is such a terrible idea. It's slow, insecure, error prone, expensive.

    I guess if you're trying to get people to tokenmaxx it may look like a valid strategy, but ain't no way this will be delightful to users.

    I think it's a symptom of just not understanding how LLMs should interface with the OS because we're still in their early days.

    Eventually there'll be an iPhone moment for the ergonomics of LLM usage outside of coding

    • nzach 17 minutes ago
      > Computer use is such a terrible idea. It's slow, insecure, error prone, expensive.

      And yet having an agent able yo use a computer on your behalf is really useful.

      Recently I gave a Nix OS vm to my hermes agent and it has been a good experience. I don't really care if destroy the machine I can just rollback to an earlier version, and for any meaningful data he creates for me I make sure he creates a repo, commit and pushes to my private Gitea instance.

  • satvikpendem 1 hour ago
    There's still no MCP support in the Gemini app, which is very useful to get various pieces of info as a user just via chatting. For example I recently wanted to get an Airbnb and wanted to filter by specific criteria including house image analysis and Gemini couldn't do it so I had to do it in Codex.
    • anticorporate 56 minutes ago
      Yeah, it seems like this is the biggest missing feature from the Gemini ecosystem.

      If I can't connect MCP, there's really no selling point for me to use Gemini from my watch, car, smart speaker, etc. If I'm already bound to using my own front end, then I'm only evaluating Gemini as a model/API, at which point it has many competitors that may be cheaper or better fit for the task.

      • thejaycampbell 52 minutes ago
        agreed... this is where they lost me too
    • tonyrice 1 hour ago
      This is why I don't always use the official Gemini Web app. Lately I've found that it's more useful to utilize a CLI. I'm looking forward to the day they add MCP in the web.
      • singingtoday 22 minutes ago
        CLI doesn't work with my subscription..
      • pregseahorses 42 minutes ago
        Gemini CLi now requires antigravity subscription..
  • beastman82 48 minutes ago
    No UI like their competitors Claude CoWork or Codex. This is vaporware
  • villgax 39 minutes ago
    Will it skip Ads lol
    • humblyCrazy 34 minutes ago
      I looked at their demo and it does not