The summary "There are still clear limits. Gemini 3.5 Flash remains a better practical choice [than GPT 5.6 Sol] for high-volume detection and counting in our benchmark, especially at its price." seems rather understated !

GPT 5.6 Sol was outperformed on all benchmarks by Gemini 3.5 Flash, apart from a single exception (OCR) where Fable was the winner.

Gemini 3.5 Flash not only outperformed GPT 5.6 Sol, but did so at 1/3 of the cost.

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SkalskiP an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Hi, I’m the author of this blog post. I wrote it about 4 weeks ago, and the VLM world is moving so fast that it’s already kinda outdated. I think Gemini 3.7 Flash might be a better choice now, especially when you factor in the price.

Here’s a comparison of the best low-cost models I put together last week. What’s crazy is that Gemini 3.7 Flash is now 50% off on OpenRouter, and this chart doesn’t even account for that discount. https://x.com/skalskip92/status/2088032652301304121?s=20

	▲	MostlyStable 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Curious why you didn't try Gemini 3 pro? That is the model I've been using for OCR entry of handwritten datasheets (JPGS of datasheets, structured JSON output). At my scale, the cost of 3 pro is basically not an issue, but if there are improvements in quality, I'd definitely be willing to explore other models

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Damjanski 5 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

thats so helpful - tysm

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an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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MrBuddyCasino 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah I was thinking about giving Luna a go with my PDF data extraction, but I think I‘ll stay on Gemini. It does a very good job.

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bicx 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Gemini is still my top choice within production software for typical data extraction from unstructured data. Gemini Flash Lite feels like a cheat code for speed, and it's really cheap.

Some other Chinese models are also fast and cheap, but a harder sell in a U.S. production environment.

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MrBuddyCasino an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite is really good. Which Chinese models can you recommend?

	▲	SkalskiP an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Hi, I’m the author of this blog. It depends on how strong of a model you need, but in general, Qwen is easily the best among the Chinese models right now. Over the last two weeks, Qwen released two new models. Qwen3.8-Max is totally insane, but it’s only available through the Alibaba Cloud API. I wrote a similar blog covering Qwen3.8-Max: [https://blog.roboflow.com/qwen3-8-max/](https://blog.roboflow.com/qwen3-8-max/) If you’re looking for something you can run locally, Qwen3.8-27B might be a great option. On Friday, I did a quick comparison between Qwen3.8-Max and Qwen3.8-27B: [https://x.com/skalskip92/status/2088411215441621469?s=20](https://x.com/skalskip92/status/2088411215441621469?s=20)
	▲	b345 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I've been using Qwen3.5-9B, hosted locally for PDF data extraction and it performs pretty well when extracting data from tables and infographics

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msp26 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

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dannyw 18 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Gemini is honestly an excellent LLM with many capability strengths.

For example, 3.7 Flash is #1 on MMLU Pro and AA’s agentic spreadsheets/docs benchmark, etc. Yes, beating Fable.

Agentic coding is only one dimension.