Trying out Gemini 3 Pro with audio transcription and a new pelican benchmark

Summary

Trying out Gemini 3 Pro with audio transcription and a new pelican benchmark 18th November 2025 Google released Gemini 3 Pro today. Here’s the announcement from Sundar Pichai, Demis Hassabis, and Koray Kavukcuoglu, their developer blog announcement from Logan Kilpatrick, the Gemini 3 Pro Model Card, and their collection of 11 more articles. It’s a big release! I had a few days of preview access to this model via AI Studio. The best way to describe it is that it’s Gemini 2.5 upgraded to match the leading rival models. Gemini 3 has the same underlying characteristics as Gemini 2.5. The knowledge cutoff is the same (January 2025). It accepts 1 million input tokens, can output up to 64,000 tokens, and has multimodal inputs across text, images, audio, and video. Benchmarks Google’s own reported numbers (in the model card) show it scoring slightly higher against Claude 4.5 Sonnet and GPT-5.1 against most of the standard benchmarks. As always I’m waiting for independent confirmation, but I have no reason to believe those numbers are inaccurate. Pricing It terms of pricing it’s a little more expensive than Gemini 2.5 but still cheaper than Claude Sonnet 4.5. Here’s how it fits in with those other leading models: Model Input (per 1M tokens) Output (per 1M tokens) GPT-5.1 $1.25 $10.00 Gemini 2.5 Pro ≤ 200k tokens: $1.25 > 200k tokens: $2.50 ≤ 200k tokens: $10.00 > 200k tokens: $15.00 Gemini 3 Pro ≤ 200k tokens: $2.00 > 200k tokens: $4.00 ≤ 200k tokens: $12.00 > 200k tokens: $18.00 Claude Sonnet 4.5 ≤ 200k tokens: $3.00 > 200k tokens: $6.00 ≤ 200k tokens: $15.00 > 200k tokens: $22.50 Claude Opus 4.1 $15.00 $75.00 Trying it out against a complex image That screenshot of the benchmarks from above looked like a good test for Gemini 3’s multimodal support. I fed it that image URL and asked it to generate alt text for the image: llm -m gemini-3-pro-preview -a https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/gemini-3-benchmarks.jpg 'Alt text for this image, include all figures and make ...