Gemini 3.1 Pro
Gemini 3.1 Pro (https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/gemini-models/gemini-3-1-pro/)
The first in the Gemini 3.1 series, priced the same as Gemini 3 Pro ($2/million input, $12/million output under 200,000 tokens, $4/$18 for 200,000 to 1,000,000). That’s less than half the price of Claude Opus 4.6 with very similar benchmark scores to that model.
They boast about its improved SVG animation performance compared to Gemini 3 Pro in the announcement!
I tried “Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle” in Google AI Studio (https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%5B%221ugF9fBfLGxnNoe8_rLlluzo9NSPJDWuF%22%5D,%22action%22:%22open%22,%22userId%22:%22106366615678321494423%22,%22resourceKeys%22:%7B%7D%7D&usp=sharing) and it thought for 323.9 seconds (thinking trace here (https://gist.github.com/simonw/03a755865021739a3659943a22c125ba#thinking-trace)) before producing this one:
It’s good to see the legs clearly depicted on both sides of the frame (should satisfy Elon (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/2023833496804839808)), the fish in the basket is a nice touch and I appreciated this comment in the SVG code (https://gist.github.com/simonw/03a755865021739a3659943a22c125ba#response):
I’ve added (https://github.com/simonw/llm-gemini/issues/121) the two new model IDs gemini-3.1-pro-preview and gemini-3.1-pro-preview-customtools to my llm-gemini plugin (https://github.com/simonw/llm-gemini) for LLM (https://llm.datasette.io/). That “custom tools” one is described here (https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/models/gemini-3.1-pro-preview#gemini-31-pro-preview-customtools) - apparently it may provide better tool performance than the default model in some situations.
The model appears to be incredibly slow right now - it took 104s to respond to a simple “hi” and a few of my other tests met “Error: This model is currently experiencing high demand. Spikes in demand are usually temporary. Please try again later.” or “Error: Deadline expired before operation could complete” errors. I’m assuming that’s just teething problems on launch day.
Tags: google (https://simonwillison.net/tags/google), svg (https://simonwillison.net/tags/svg), ai (https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai), generative-ai (https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai), llms (https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms), llm (https://simonwillison.net/tags/llm), gemini (https://simonwillison.net/tags/gemini), pelican-riding-a-bicycle (https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle), llm-release (https://simonwillison.net/tags/llm-release)