Google showed off a lot of new Gemini features and tools at Google I/O 2026, including the powerful new Google Omni video creator and editor. But the Gemini 3.5 Flash model is supposed to be the real workhorse, according to the company. Google has positioned it as faster and stronger at coding, long context reasoning, multimodal understanding, and more. More importantly, it's supposedly capable of managing the kind of tangled requests real people actually throw at AI.
To see where Gemini 3.5 Flash really stands, I gave it five prompts designed to test very different strengths. Some were practical. Some were deliberately ridiculous. All of them highlighted capabilities Google has emphasized as part of Gemini 3.5 Flash’s evolution beyond earlier Flash models and Gemini 3.1.
