Google Says New AI Model Gemini 3 Flash Is Built for Speed

Google launched a new artificial intelligence (AI) model called Gemini 3 Flash on Wednesday (Dec. 17), saying this model is “built for speed” and will be available across the company’s products.

The company rolled out Gemini 3 Flash globally to developers in the Gemini API in Google AI Studio, Gemini CLI and Google Antigravity; to enterprises in Vertex AI and Gemini Enterprise; and to everyone in the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search, according to a Wednesday blog post.

“With Gemini 3, we introduced frontier performance across complex reasoning, multimodal and vision understanding, and agentic and vibe coding tasks,” Tulsee Doshi, senior director, product management at Google DeepMind, wrote in the post. “Gemini 3 Flash retains this foundation, combining Gemini 3’s Pro-grade reasoning with Flash-level latency, efficiency and cost. It not only enables everyday tasks with improved reasoning, but also it our most impressive model for agentic workflows.”

For AI Mode in Search, Gemini 3 Flash will be the default model globally, according to another blog post.

In addition, Gemini 3 Pro is now available in Search to everyone in the United States, and Nano Banana Pro (Gemini 3 Pro Image) is available to more people in the U.S. These models can be selected through “Thinking with 3 Pro” in the AI Mode drop-down menu.

“Gemini 3 Flash’s strong performance in reasoning, tool use and multimodal capabilities enable AI Mode to tackle your most complicated questions with greater precision — without compromising speed,” Robby Stein, vice president of product, Google Search, wrote in the post.

In the Gemini app, Gemini 3 Flash will offer a choice of “Fast” or “Thinking” modes, while Gemini 3 Pro is available as “Pro” in the model picker and is recommended for advanced math and code, according to another blog post.

“For too long, AI forced a big choice: big models that were slow and expensive, or high speed models that were less capable,” Josh Woodward, vice president, Google Labs & Gemini, wrote in the post. “Gemini 3 Flash ends this compromise. Gemini 3 Flash delivers smarts and speed.”

The launch of Google 3 Flash follows the Nov. 18 introduction of the Gemini 3 AI model, which was then deployed directly into Google Search, the Gemini app and the company’s enterprise cloud stack.

It was reported Dec. 9 that Gemini outpaced OpenAI’s ChatGPT in terms of growth of monthly active users during November, though ChatGPT still had close to twice as many users.