Overview
Google released Gemini 3.1 Pro, the first model in their new 3.1 series, with significantly improved SVG generation capabilities compared to previous versions. The model matches Claude Opus performance at less than half the price, though it’s experiencing launch day performance issues with very slow response times.
Key Points
- Pricing advantage - costs $2/$12 per million tokens compared to Claude Opus 4.6, delivering similar benchmark performance at less than half the price
- Enhanced creative capabilities - demonstrates dramatically improved SVG animation and illustration generation, as shown by detailed pelican-on-bicycle example with proper anatomy and creative details
- Launch performance issues - experiencing extremely slow response times (104s for simple queries) and frequent timeout errors due to high demand on release day
- Model family expansion - represents the core intelligence behind last week’s Deep Think release, suggesting Google is building a comprehensive 3.1 model suite with specialized variants