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The reality is using AI for financial research is very important. I use it for analyzing earnings reports, acting as a stock screener, doing advanced earnings projections, finding qualitative issues with a company and more.
Prior to this week, based on many tests and experiments, Gemini was hands down the best (even better than Anthropic). But everything changed this week with the disastrous rollout of 3.5.
Before this week, the options were:
* Fast - This was in essence Flash 3.1 Regular, but it would silently upshift to 3.1 Pro on its own to answer complicated questions for paid customers. It worked extremely well.
* Pro - This was Flash 3.1 Pro and worked well, but typically you didn't need it over Fast, because again Fast would upshift automatically when it needed to do more research.
* Thinking - This Flash 3.1 Regular but with a advanced reasoning and logic depth.
After this week the options are now:
* 3.5 Flash - This is the new default and produces garbage results. Under the hood it's likely 3.5 Flash lite...it's very fast and efficient, but it often ignores your parameters and issues hallucinated answers.
* 3.1 Flash Lite - This is an inferior version of 3.1 Flash Regular and designed purely for speed and saving Google on compute. It's junk.
* 3.1 Flash Pro - This is a good version. But NOW google has capped its used heavily. They don't show it, but every time you use 3.1 Flash Pro, it secretly deducts against new weekly and 5 hour quotas. I did the math...to do one owners earnings analysis docked 15% of my five hour quote...so now Google is just give me one quality query per hour. After that the good options are greyed out, and I'm stock with the cheap versions that no longer work.
* There is an extended thinking level option, but it doesn't help much and it chews through your quota fast.
The errors with 3.5 are hideous. It frequently gets basic information like tickers wrong or earnings dates (which 3.1 used to be very good with). It's also getting very lazy in its analysis. What I liked to do with owners earnings projections was have the LLM compute their own figures and then debate each other to see what the others missed. 3.1 used to win these debates and be the most accurate (beating even Anthropic). But now the new 3.5 Flash is losing these debates...and now even Facebook AI is showing better results than Gemini 3.5 Flash. I also use Gemini for programming and web design and 3.5's regressions here are shockingly bad.
Gemini used to be the five star restaurant of LLM's...now it's the McDonalds. Remember Gemini 3 was so revolutionary, it caused OpenAI to literally issue a "Code Red" emergency to focus on their own engine improvements. Part of Gemini downshifting to save on compute/power is understandable...but maybe for free customers. For us paying customers who prepaid a year in advanced, this is very dishonest. Despite paying, I can essentially only use a decent version of Gemini about once an hour before all the good options grey out. And while the new Gemini filled their interface with new junk options...there no visible running tally showing how much compute your prompt used and what you have left. You have to go to a hidden settings menu to see how much hourly and weekly compute you have left.
So what are the options for serious stock researchers?
* Anthropic/Claude: It's very good and already and I suspect it's already the LLM of choice among big financial analysts like hedge funds. They focus mostly on B2B customers and not B2C...they also don't dabble with images/video...and they have the massive compute resources of Amazon behind them. Their strength is they have the strongest grounding (least hallucinations). I also don't think they will ever intentionally nerf their own algorithm like Google did to trade quantity for quality. On the downside, the free version is exceptionally slow and limited.
* Grok: This is surprisingly good, especially with financial news. They lack the complicated reasoning of Gemini 3.1, and the lack of hallucination control of Anthropic, so they can't be considered the leader, but they're on that next tier.
* Meta AI: This isn't a top-tier LLM for financial research but is getting better. They stole some of Google's top AI engineers and it shows...they've improved while Gemini has gotten worse. Unlike the other engines it's also not slammed with users so its performance and lack of throttling is pretty good (for now)
* Stick with Gemini: 3.5 now is almost unusable, but there is maybe some hope they make improvements to appease power users. Sundar Pichai though is very stubborn about admitting mistakes. eg Look at the disaster Google Analytics 4 was...I doubt we see huge changes if for now other reason Google is likely running out of compute power.
* DeepSeek: They recently revamped their engine and it's way better/faster with access to the most recent financial documents. The Chinese LLM's are investing a ton into AI technology and need to be treated seriously.
* OpenAI: OpenAI still makes too many mistakes. It's priority is speed and efficiency...not quality. It's the "dollar store" version of LLMs
Alphabet's stock has been in decline this week since 3.5 was rolled out. As it dawns on investors what a disaster 3.5 is, I suspect it continues to fall. For such a shoddy project to be released, means the brain drain at Google is more serious than realized or Google has a compute scarcity emergency on their hands.