Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Tuesday, 3rd March 2026

Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite. Google's latest model is an update to their inexpensive Flash-Lite family. At $0.25/million tokens of input and $1.5/million output this is 1/8th the price of Gemini 3.1 Pro.

It supports four different thinking levels, so I had it output four different pelicans:

A minimalist vector-style illustration of a stylized bird riding a bicycle.

minimal

A minimalist graphic of a light blue round bird with a single black dot for an eye, wearing a yellow backpack and riding a black bicycle on a flat grey line.

low

A minimalist digital illustration of a light blue bird wearing a yellow backpack while riding a bicycle.

medium

A minimal, stylized line drawing of a bird-like creature with a yellow beak riding a bicycle made of simple geometric lines.

high

# 9:53 pm / google, ai, generative-ai, llms, llm, gemini, llm-pricing, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, llm-release

Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I'd been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 - Anthropic's hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I'll have to revise my opinions about "generative AI" one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving.

— Donald Knuth, Claude's Cycles

# 11:59 pm / ai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, claude, llm-reasoning, november-2025-inflection, donald-knuth

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