Google released Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite on March 3, 2026, its fastest and most cost-efficient model yet. In the same sweep, it opened Project Genie to subscribers and gave Pixel phones the ability to order your groceries.
What Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Can Do
Flash-Lite is built for developers running AI at high volume. Think thousands of API calls per hour, not a single chatbot conversation. The model delivers its first response token 2.5x faster and pushes output 45% faster than Gemini 2.5 Flash, which was already quick. It scores 86.9% on GPQA Diamond (a scientific reasoning test) and 76.8% on MMMU Pro (a test of understanding images and text together). That puts it well above other models in its size class.
Pricing sits at $0.25 per million input tokens and $1.50 per million output tokens. That is one-eighth the cost of Gemini 3.1 Pro, the flagship model Google released in mid-February 2026. The price has tripled over the older Flash-Lite 2.5 model, but the performance jump is significant. Flash-Lite is available now on Google AI Studio and Vertex AI.
Project Genie and the Pixel AI Agent
Also this week, Google opened access to Project Genie, a tool that generates playable interactive worlds from a text prompt or image. You describe a character and environment, Genie builds a world you can actually navigate in real time. Right now it is only available to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. Google published a guide with four prompt-writing tips to get the best results, focusing on detailed environment descriptions and action-oriented inputs.
On the consumer side, Google’s March Pixel drop added agentic features to Pixel phones. Gemini can now complete tasks on your behalf inside select apps, including ordering groceries on Grubhub and booking a ride on Uber. The feature runs in the background and shows progress as it works. Three announcements in one day signals that Google is moving fast across both the developer and consumer sides of AI at the same time.