"Better" as in the posted benchmarks perhaps, but in actual conversations v4-flash (and vision-exp) is a different flavor and personality, and with a chat assistant it the experience is night and day. You can test it yourself, just feed it some jokes. The new version has a particular US closed model tone, I would describe it as "severed" so if you like forced prompt engineering you will like the new "better". If you need an assistant to get you some answers where it has some banter, v4-flash is superior in both experience and delivered output.
