Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
The launch — and why the launch is not the story On 19 May 2026 at Google I/O, Sundar Pichai introduced Gemini 3.5 Flash and the Gemini Spark personal-agent layer. Headline specs are familiar: a 1M-token context window, full multimodal input across text, image, video and audio, and throughput around 280 tokens per second. The model went GA on day one through Google AI Studio, Vertex AI, and Antigravity, Google's agent-first dev platform. Coverage so far has focused on the capability story — reportedly beating the previous Gemini 3.1 Pro on coding and agentic benchmarks (note: 3.1 Pro, not the current 3.5 Pro tier). That framing buries the lede. The interesting line in Google's pricing page is this: $1.50 per million input tokens, $9.00 per million output tokens. Compared with Gemini 3.1…
