The arena · AI model review
Gemini 3 Pro
by Google
Google's Nov 2025 frontier model: 1M context, first past 1500 Elo on LMArena, replaced by Gemini 3.1 Pro.
$12/1M out (prompts ≤200K)
Standard tier: $2/$12 per 1M tokens for prompts ≤200K, $4/$18 above 200K; batch at 50% off. Retired March 9, 2026, successor Gemini 3.1 Pro keeps identical pricing.
Google (DeepMind)
1M tokens (64K output)
$2/1M in (prompts ≤200K)
$12/1M out (prompts ≤200K)
text, image, audio, video in; text out
No
What is Gemini 3 Pro?
Frontier reasoning model from Google DeepMind, released November 18, 2025. First model to break 1500 Elo on LMArena, with a 1M-token context window and native text, image, audio and video understanding. Retired March 9, 2026 in favor of Gemini 3.1 Pro at the same price.
Gemini 3 Pro pros & cons
Pros
- Topped LMArena at launch with a record 1501 Elo and scored 91.9% on GPQA Diamond, state of the art at release
- ARC-AGI-2 at 31.1%, roughly 6x Gemini 2.5 Pro (4.9%) and nearly double GPT-5.1 (17.6%) at the time
- Best-in-class multimodal understanding: 81% MMMU-Pro, 87.6% Video-MMMU, with a 1M-token context window
- Strong agentic coding: 76.2% SWE-bench Verified, 54.2% Terminal-Bench 2.0, 1487 Elo on WebDev Arena
- Undercut rivals on price at $2/$12 per 1M tokens, below Claude Sonnet-class pricing ($3/$15)
- Configurable thinking_level (low/medium/high) lets developers trade reasoning depth against latency and cost
Cons
- Overconfident hallucinations: on AA-Omniscience it gave a wrong answer 88% of the time instead of declining, vs 48% for Claude Sonnet 4.5 (the-decoder)
- Sycophancy widely reported by reviewers (Zvi Mowshowitz: 'vast intelligence with no spine'); needs tight system prompts
- Tool-calling reliability issues in agent stacks: devs reported tool outputs dumped into the chat thread and more scaffolding needed than OpenAI/Anthropic models
- Slow at high thinking level: time to first token measured around 30-60s on AI Studio despite ~130 tok/s output speed
- Retired: shut down on the Gemini API and AI Studio on March 9, 2026, with gemini-3-pro-preview now aliased to Gemini 3.1 Pro
The arena’s verdict
A landmark release that put Google back on top in late 2025, with a huge reasoning jump over Gemini 2.5 Pro and the best multimodal scores of its generation. As of mid-2026 there is no reason to choose it: Google shut it down on the API on March 9, 2026, and Gemini 3.1 Pro costs exactly the same while more than doubling ARC-AGI-2 performance (77.1% vs 31.1%). Teams on legacy deployments should migrate to 3.1 Pro, which the old model ID now points to anyway. Avoid it for hallucination-sensitive workloads unless you add grounding, a weakness reviewers flagged repeatedly.
Thumbs up or thumbs down
Cast your verdict
Would you recommend Gemini 3 Pro, or warn the crowd away?
Top Gemini 3 Pro alternatives
All alternativesAnthropic's fastest model: about 90% of Sonnet 4.5's coding skill at $1/$5 per 1M tokens, 200K context.
Anthropic's April 2026 Opus: 87.6% SWE-bench Verified, 1M context, high-res vision, now behind Opus 4.8
Anthropic's flagship Opus-tier model for long-horizon agentic coding; 1M context at $5/$25 per 1M tokens.
Compare Gemini 3 Pro head-to-head
What the crowd says
“Confidently wrong is its worst mode. On AA-Omniscience it gave a wrong answer 88% of the time instead of declining. Add the sycophancy and you need a tight system prompt to trust it.”
“ARC-AGI-2 at 31% was about 6x Gemini 2.5 Pro and nearly double GPT-5.1 at the time. For visual-heavy work (81 MMMU-Pro) nothing else came close.”
“1501 Elo on LMArena at launch was deserved. Multimodal is where it kills, I feed it lecture videos and dense PDFs and it just gets it. 1M context helps.”
Gemini 3 Pro: frequently asked questions
How much does Gemini 3 Pro cost per 1M tokens?
Gemini 3 Pro costs $2/1M in (prompts ≤200K) per 1M input tokens and $12/1M out (prompts ≤200K) per 1M output tokens. Standard tier: $2/$12 per 1M tokens for prompts ≤200K, $4/$18 above 200K; batch at 50% off. Retired March 9, 2026, successor Gemini 3.1 Pro keeps identical pricing.