Gemini 3.1 Pro Scores Big on Reasoning Benchmarks

Tug-of-war time, Tech Insiders.

It's rivalry season: Google vs. Anthropic on benchmarks, Hollywood vs. ByteDance on IP, and Amazon vs. Walmart on revenue.

Lean in—the rope's fraying, and somebody's about to face-plant in the mud.

Here's what you need to know today:

Gemini 3.1 Pro Levels Up Reasoning

Google's new brain actually thinks before it blurts.

Google rolled out Gemini 3.1 Pro yesterday, touting a 77.1% score on novel logic puzzles that models can't just memorize—more than double 3 Pro's result—and record marks for expert-level scientific knowledge (hitting 94.3%).

The million-token-context model handles text, images, audio, video, and full codebases, then returns outputs up to 64,000 tokens.

Preview access is already live in the Gemini app, AI Studio, Vertex AI, GitHub Copilot, Android Studio, Gemini CLI, and Google Antigravity (plus NotebookLM for paid Pro and Ultra subscribers).

Demos showed it coding animated SVGs, wiring an ISS telemetry dashboard, and conjuring a hand-tracked 3D starling swarm, all at the same $2-per-million-input-tokens rate for prompts under 200,000 tokens.

Benchmark caveats remain. For example, while 3.1 Pro wins that notoriously brutal PhD-level trivia gauntlet when flying solo, Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 beats it once the AIs are allowed to cheat with web tools. And the older Gemini 3 Pro still edges it out slightly on complex image-and-text brainteasers. But 3.1 Pro tightens Google's grip on deep-reasoning workloads just as autonomous agents hit the mainstream.

Why it matters: Cheaper, deeper thinking means cleaner code suggestions, faster data synthesis, and (fingers crossed) fewer "sorry, I can't do that" moments when your project needs real brains.

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Insider Intel

Hollywood Rallies to Quash Seedance 'Piracy' Tool

Hollywood just gave ByteDance a three‑day timeout—minus the juice box.

Netflix hit send on a cease-and-desist calling ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 a "high-speed piracy engine," coming hot on the heels of a hyperrealistic AI video of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt brawling on a rooftop that went viral last week. The streaming giant gave TikTok's global parent three business days to purge anything that looks like Demogorgons, "Bridgerton" ball gowns, "KPop Demon Hunters," or "Squid Game" dolls.

Disney, Paramount, and Warner Bros. piled on with their own letters, accusing Seedance of serving up Marvel heroes, Klingons, and caped crusaders as if they were free GIF packs.

Guilds from SAG‑AFTRA to the Motion Picture Association are screaming infringement, while writers like "Deadpool" scribe Rhett Reese wonder aloud if Hollywood just got Napstered, i.e., blindsided by the ultimate free-for-all copy machine. Even the Japanese government is launching a copyright probe over AI-generated anime knockoffs.

ByteDance says it "respects IP" and will add new safeguards, but critics note Chinese open‑source models already power a third of global AI use.

The real fear? Once AI spits out a flawless blockbuster trailer, good luck putting that genie back in the bottle.

Somewhere, Mickey is sharpening the lawyers' lightsabers.

Flash Bytes

Audit Risk Is Shifting—Secure Your Seat

Compliance effort is rising, but audit confidence isn't.

Join The State of Audit and AI Compliance in 2026 on March 19 at 1:00 p.m. ET for a research-backed discussion led by Thoropass. The session will examine where compliance programs are struggling, why audit execution has become the primary risk, and how leaders are restoring governance and visibility.

Security Alerts

Patch Now: Windows Admin Center Privilege Flaw

Microsoft slipped a critical Windows Admin Center patch into December 2025's v2511 release but only revealed this week that it fixes CVE‑2026‑26119, an improper‑auth bug scoring 8.8.

A low‑privilege account can hijack the rights of the WAC service (often domain admin) to reconfigure servers or spawn backdoor accounts.

No active exploitation yet, but Microsoft labels it "Exploitation More Likely."

If you actually bothered to update to v2511 back in December, congratulations, you're already immune. For everyone else: patch now, segment access, enforce MFA, and monitor for sudden credential upgrades.

Patch before you log off; your midnight is a ransomware gang's morning coffee.

Figure Breach Leaks Customer Identity Data

Fintech lender Figure confirmed a January social-engineering break-in after ShinyHunters posted 2.5 GB of stolen files following a refused ransom demand.

Troy Hunt of Have I Been Pwned says the dump holds about 967,200 email addresses, along with names, DOBs, physical addresses, and phone numbers—an identity thief's starter kit.

Figure blames a phished employee, but the reality is they got caught in ShinyHunters' massive Okta single sign-on (SSO) vishing campaign, where hackers literally called victims and impersonated IT support.

While the company offers credit monitoring, act now: reset your Figure password (and stop reusing it elsewhere), watch out for phony "IT support" SMS scams, freeze your credit if you've borrowed, and enable PIN-based phone port protection with your carrier to block SIM-swapping.

Fraud calls may come faster than their loan funding.

Industry Shakeups

Amazon Tops Walmart, Powered by Cloud Cash

Amazon's 2025 revenue rang in at $716.9 billion, edging past Walmart's $713.2 billion and ending the big-box behemoth's 13-year reign atop the Fortune 500.

The deciding factor wasn't Prime Day or Whole Foods; it was Amazon Web Services, whose $128.7 billion haul (and fatter margins) bankrolled everything from one-hour delivery to those splashy Oscar-bait films.

AWS now supplies roughly 18% of Amazon's sales but well over half of its operating profit, giving the e-commerce titan a war chest for AI chips, satellite broadband, and delivery drones.

A projected $200 billion capex line for 2026 sets a new cost curve for rivals, while locking enterprise customers even tighter into Amazon's ever-growing tech stack. (It certainly helps that Amazon's federal tax bill for 2025 was slashed by a $7.8 billion tax break.)

Of course, becoming the biggest company on Earth apparently requires some messy housecleaning: Amazon just laid off 16,000 corporate workers, binned its flashy "Blue Jay" warehouse robot, and faces a $1 billion settlement over shady refund practices.

Walmart, fresh off its own $1 trillion market-cap milestone, isn't sulking. New CEO John Furner has doubled down on retail media, AI shopping bots, and a Nasdaq listing to flaunt the company's tech credentials.

But there's a catch: Walmart's resilience is heavily propped up by six-figure earners navigating a K-shaped economy, while its core low-income shoppers are stretched to the breaking point. Yet without a cloud arm, the retail incumbent's counterpunch may hinge on leveraging its 10,000-store footprint for speedier grocery and same-day pickup.

At this point, the Walmart greeter might hand you a résumé for AWS; just assume an AI hasn't already filled the role.

Meet Our Author

Justin Meyers

Writer at TechnologyAdvice

Justin Meyers is an investigative writer and editor who draws on over a decade of meticulous hands-on research to deliver the full, trustworthy story behind consumer and enterprise tech, including cybersecurity.

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