i think the 6.18 kernel scheduler contributes most of the gains, but it's hard to distinguish which improvements led to the biggest gains. also the clock change (no longer context switching to the host to sync the clock)
IME 3.1 Pro still has better system-instruction following than Flash 3.7, esp. when there're many conditions and clauses. 3.1 also writes better prose for technical material than Flash 3.7.
Once the system prompt complexity goes up, Flash starts to write very dense english. it might be fine for tasks like coding, but not for user-facing text meant to be digested by the average person.
I'm finding Gemini 3.7 speaks a lot more academically. Its explanations are not clear and intuitive by default.
Maybe this has to do with all the RLVR it went through, where reasoning through difficult academic/coding problems caused it to think and speak a certain way.
The benchmarks looks great but it doesn't feel as legible, so maybe it's more meant to be an agentic model rather than an everyday model whose outputs are read by humans?
