Google has accelerated its pace by releasing a new lightweight artificial intelligence (AI) model in just three weeks, but it suffered a blow to its pride after showing lower performance than Meta's AI model unveiled on the same day.

Furthermore, the "Pro" model long anticipated by the market has been missing in action for over half a year.

On the 2nd local time, Google unveiled "Gemini 3.8 Flash," a lightweight model with enhanced reasoning and coding capabilities.

Following the consecutive releases of Gemini 3.6 Flash on July 21 and Gemini 3.7 Flash on August 13, Google rolled out another new lightweight model at a three-week interval.

Google emphasized that despite being a lightweight model, Gemini 3.8 Flash outperformed OpenAI's top-tier model "GPT-5.6 Sol" and Anthropic's "Claude Opus 5" on "DeepSWE v1.1," a benchmark measuring software engineering problem-solving capabilities.

The company also introduced that in financial and legal analysis, the new model surpassed not only the previous 3.7 Flash but also other frontier models.

However, Gemini 3.8 Flash turned out to have lower performance than competitor Meta's new model "Muse Spark 1.3," which was released on the same day.

AI performance analysis firm Artificial Analysis gave Muse Spark 1.3 an Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (AAII) score of 62, tying it for third place with Anthropic's Claude 5 Fable, while giving Gemini 3.8 Flash a lower score of 59.

Alexander Wang, Chief AI Officer (CAIO) at Meta who leads the development of the Muse Spark model, openly mocked Google on social media, posting, "I really didn't want to say this, but... Gemini who?"

Meanwhile, Google announced at its annual developer conference "I/O" last May that it would launch Gemini 3.5 Pro in June, but the schedule has been indefinitely delayed as the company has failed to boost its coding capabilities.

The last Pro model released by Google was "Gemini 3.1 Pro," launched last February.

(Photo: AP, Yonhap News)