xAI & Google: How do Grok 4.6 and Gemini 3.7 Flash Perform?

xAI & Google: How do Grok 4.6 and Gemini 3.7 Flash Perform?

Two of the top US firms, xAI and Google DeepMind, have both released new AI models: Grok 4.6 and Gemini 3.7 Flash, respectively.

Grok 4.6 builds on Grok 4.5 with a particular focus on long-running agents and more ambitious interactive and visual work, while Gemini 3.7 Flash is billed as Google’s most intelligent workhorse model yet for coding and agents.

As the two firms look to gain ground on rivals Anthropic and OpenAI, which lead across most benchmarks, they are increasingly competing on cost with Chinese firms – like Moonshot’s Kimi K3 – for enterprise customers.

Google is currently overhauling its AI division, Google DeepMind. Demis Hassabis stepped down from his role as CEO of Google DeepMind to become Chair and Chief Scientist of Google’s parent company Alphabet.

Google is scaling up Gemini’s commercial footprint. In a message announcing Demis’s departure, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, wrote: “We have to accelerate all this work and stay focused on the AI frontier.”

According to Reuters, Google Co-founder Sergey Brin in recent months has urged key AI staff to go all in on the company's Gemini model, likely in a bid to compete with the top offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Google’s latest offering, Gemini 3.7 Flash, delivers substantial improvements across software engineering, knowledge work and web development workflows – with an introductory price of half the original 3.6 Flash cost per million tokens.

Cost is increasingly an issue for US AI firms. Even leading US labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic are releasing cheaper models – fighting to retain cost-conscious customers who are switching to cut-price alternatives from Chinese rivals, notes the Financial Times.

The company highlights that Gemini 3.7 Flash delivers a noticeably improved developer experience over 3.6 Flash. It better adapts to roadblocks, clarifies intent when needed and follows instructions with greater fidelity.

The model is positioned as a lower-cost option for enterprises. “Until now, getting high-quality answers from complex enterprise data has been expensive at scale,” says Ivan Zhou, AI Research Manager at Databricks. “Models like Gemini 3.7 Flash are changing that by delivering better intelligence at dramatically lower cost.”

For knowledge-dense fields like finance, law and biosciences, Gemini 3.7 Flash delivers improved reasoning and accuracy, Google argues.

xAI highlights it tested Grok 4.6 on projects designed to “stretch its range” and “ability to sustain work over many steps”. Simultaneously, xAI, led by CEO Elon Musk, launched Grok Bot, which it describes as “AI teammates you can give real work to”.

xAI’s Grok 4.6 model stays with complex tasks across many steps, whether researching a topic, analysing information, working across a codebase, or turning an idea into a polished application or work AI.

It found the model is especially strong at turning a broad product idea into a working first version. It can research unfamiliar domains, structure the application, implement the core interactions and continue refining the result through several rounds of feedback.

Writing on the platform X, Elon recently said: “Grok 4.6 is objectively #1 when considering intelligence, speed and cost,” shared with a benchmarking image from Artificial Analysis. However, Elon's claim is arguable rather than objective.

Like the latest Gemini offering, Grok 4.6 is another model looking to compete with high-level capabilities at low cost: Grok 4.6 costs US$0.84 per task – which is exactly the same price as Chinese firm Moonshot’s Kimi K3.

On X, Elon also responded to a user called MiaAI_lab who wrote: “I’m happy to report that Grok 4.6 is just as good as Kimi K3 for everything related to the kernel and modding,” reposting simply with the text: “Grok 4.6.”

xAI highlights that Grok 4.6’s safeguards have been improved and calibrated in line with the model’s capabilities. There have been serious concerns over Grok’s safety capabilities and guardrails.

BBC News reported in March that xAI is facing a lawsuit from teenagers who say the company facilitated child pornography by allowing the creation of sexually explicit images of them.