Yes. Even though 3.8 Flash outperforms 3.1 Pro in benchmarks, in my use cases, 3.8 Flash is completely inferior to 3.1 Pro.
Specifically, 3.8 Flash suffers from far more hallucinations than 3.1 Pro and frequently ignores the context between consecutive messages. These two issues are fatal to the chat experience.
Because of this experience, I believe that benchmarks are quite limited to evaluate a model's real-world performance, and most current benchmarks focus on coding performance rather than chatting. At the moment, I have almost no reason to use 3.8 Flash.
Specifically, 3.8 Flash suffers from far more hallucinations than 3.1 Pro and frequently ignores the context between consecutive messages. These two issues are fatal to the chat experience.
Because of this experience, I believe that benchmarks are quite limited to evaluate a model's real-world performance, and most current benchmarks focus on coding performance rather than chatting. At the moment, I have almost no reason to use 3.8 Flash.