In my niche Redactle puzzle solving benchmark [1] I noticed Gemini 3.8 flash is slightly faster than 3.7 flash. They both smoke every model I've tested. I have not yet run 3.5 flash. Gemini models are great at this task because they seem to have exact Wikipedia text baked into the weights. When I rewrite the wiki text a bit it's not able to one-shot the game so much.

[1]: https://redactle.net/llm-leaderboard

It depends on how you're querying Gemini models. OpenRouter is the fastest by far. I'm guessing they bought the dedicated pipe from Google. Gemini via VertexAI and consumer API has pretty bad latency.