Only using my historical experience and not Gemini 3.1 Pro, I think we see benchmark chasing then a grand release of a model that gets press attention...

Then a few days later, the model/settings are degraded to save money. Then this gets repeated until the last day before the release of the new model.

If we are benchmaxing this works well because its only being tested early on during the life cycle. By middle of the cycle, people are testing other models. By the end, people are not testing them, and if they did it would barely shake the last months of data.