Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gemini 2.0 is now available to everyone

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 285 posts

Re: Gemini 2.0 is now available to everyone

#71

Post by Alifatisk »

Exciting news to see these models being released to the Gemini app, I would wish my preferences on which model I want to default to got saved for further sessions.

How many tokens can gemini.google.com handle as input? How large is the context window before it forgets? A quick search said it's 128k token window but that applies to Gemini 1.5 Pro, how is it now then?

My assumption is that "Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental is just" "Gemini 2.0 Flash" with reasoning and "Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental with apps" is just "Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental" with access to the web and Googles other services, right? So sticking to "Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental with apps" should be the optimal choice.

Is there any reason why Gemini 1.5 Flash is still an option? Feels like it should be removed as an option unless it does something better than the other.

I have difficulties understanding where each variant of the Gemini model is suited the most. Looking at aistudio.google.com, they have already update the available models.

Is "Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental" on gemini.google.com just "Gemini experiment 1206" or was it "Gemini Flash Thinking Experimental" aistudio.google.com?

I have a note on my notes app where I rank every llm based on instructions following and math, to this day, I've had difficulties knowing where to place every Gemini model. I know there is a little popup when you hover over each model that tries to explain what each model does and which tasks it is best suited for, but these explanations have been very vague to me. And I haven't even started on the Gemini Advanced series or whatever I should call it.

The available models on aistudio is now:

- Gemini 2.0 Flash (gemini-2.0-flash)

- Gemini 2.0 Flash Lite Preview (gemini-2.0-flash-lite-preview-02-05)

- Gemini 2.0 Pro Experimental (gemini-2.0-pro-exp-02-05)

- Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental (gemini-2.0-flash-thinking-exp-01-21)

If I had to sort these from most likely to fulfill my need to least likely, then it would probably be:

gemini-2.0-flash-thinking-exp-01-21 > gemini-2.0-pro-exp-02-05 > gemini-2.0-flash-lite-preview-02-05 > gemini-2.0-flash

Why? Because aistudio describes gemini-2.0-flash-thinking-exp-01-21 as being able to tackle most complex and difficult tasks while gemini-2.0-pro-exp-02-05 and gemini-2.0-flash-lite-preview-02-05 only differs with how much context they can handle.

So with that out of the way, how does Gemini-2.0-flash-thinking-exp-01-21 compare against o3-mini, Qwen 2.5 Max, Kimi k1.5, DeepSeek R1, DeepSeek V3 and Sonnet 3.5?

My current list of benchmarks I go through is artificialanalysis.ai, lmarena.ai, livebench.ai and aider.chat:s polygot benchmark but still, the whole Gemini suite is difficult to reason and sort out.

I feel like this trend of having many different models with the same name but different suffix starts be an obstacle to my mental model.

Re: Gemini 2.0 is now available to everyone

#72

Post by justanotheratom »

mohsen1 wrote: post #8

> available via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI. > Gemini 2.0, 2.0 Pro and 2.0 Pro Experimental, Gemini 2.0 Flash, Gemini 2.0 Flash Lite 3 different ways of accessing the API, more than 5 different but extremely similarly named models. Benchmarks only comparing to their own models. Can't be more "Googley"!

They actually have two "studios"

Google AI Studio and Google Cloud Vertex AI Studio

And both have their own documentation, different ways of "tuning" the model.

Talk about shipping the org chart.

Re: Gemini 2.0 is now available to everyone

#73

Post by easychris »

singhrac wrote: post #56
ysofunny wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmm did you try clickin where it says 'gemini advanced'? I find it opens a drop down

I just tried it but nothing happens when I click on that. You're talking about the thing on the upper left next to the open/close menu button?

Yes, very frustrating for me as well. I consider now purchasing Gemini Advance with another Non-Workspace account. :-(

I also found this [1]: “ Important:

A chat can only use one model. If you switch between models in an existing chat, it automatically starts a new chat. If you’re using Gemini Apps with a work or school Google Account, you can’t switch between models. Learn more about using Gemini Apps with a work or school account.”

I have no idea why the workspace accounts are such restricted.

[1] https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/14517446?hl=en&co=G...

Re: Gemini 2.0 is now available to everyone

#74

Post by Alifatisk »

rzz3 wrote: post #67

It’s funny, I’ve never actually used Gemini and, though this may be incorrect, I automatically assume it’s awful. I assume it’s awful because the AI summaries at the top of Google Search are so awful, and that’s made me never give Google AI a chance.

The huge context window is a big selling point.

Re: Gemini 2.0 is now available to everyone

#75

Post by Alifatisk »

msuvakov wrote: post #59

Gemini 2.0 works great with large context. A few hours ago, I posted a ShowHN about parsing an entire book in a single prompt. The goal was to extract characters, relationships, and descriptions that could then be used for image generation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42946317

Which Gemini model is notebooklm using atm? Have they switched yet?

Re: Gemini 2.0 is now available to everyone

#76

Post by Alifatisk »

leonidasv wrote: post #70

That 1M tokens context window alone is going to kill a lot of RAG use cases. Crazy to see how we went from 4K tokens context windows (2023 ChatGPT-3.5) to 1M in less than 2 years.

Gemini can in theory handle 10M tokens, I remember they saying it in one of their presentations.

Re: Gemini 2.0 is now available to everyone

#77

Post by cheeze »

falcor84 wrote: post #54
leetharris wrote: post #39

These names are unbelievably bad. Flash, Flash-Lite? How do these AI companies keep doing this? Sonnet 3.5 v2 o3-mini-high Gemini Flash-Lite It's like a competition to see who can make the goofiest naming conventions. Regarding model quality, we experiment with Google models constantly at Rev and they are consistently the worst of all the major players. They always benchmark well and consistently fail in real tasks.…

> It's like a competition to see who can make the goofiest naming conventions. I'm still waiting for one of them to overflow from version 360 down to One.

Just wait for One X, S, Series X, Series X Pro, Series X Pro with Super Fast Charging 2.0

Re: Gemini 2.0 is now available to everyone

#78

Post by Alifatisk »

Tiberium wrote: post #24
gwern wrote: post #7

2.0 Pro Experimental seems like the big news here? > Today, we’re releasing an experimental version of Gemini 2.0 Pro that responds to that feedback. It has the strongest coding performance and ability to handle complex prompts, with better understanding and reasoning of world knowledge, than any model we’ve released so far. It comes with our largest context window at 2 million tokens, which enables it to comprehensi…

It's not that big of a news because they already had gemini-exp-1206 on the API - they just didn't say it was Gemini 2.0 Pro until today. Now the AI Studio marks it as 2.0 Pro Experimental - basically an older snapshot, the newer one is gemini-2.0-pro-exp-02-05.

Oh so the previous model gemini-exp-1206 is now gemini-2.0-pro-experimental on aistudio? Is it better than gemini-2.0-flash-thinking-exp?

Re: Gemini 2.0 is now available to everyone

#79

Post by Alifatisk »

jbarrow wrote: post #61

I've been very impressed by Gemini 2.0 Flash for multimodal tasks, including object detection and localization[1], plus document tasks. But the 15 requests per minute limit was a severe limiter while it was experimental. I'm really excited to be able to actually _do_ things with the model. In my experience, I'd reach for Gemini 2.0 Flash over 4o in a lot of multimodal/document use cases. Especially given the differen…

> In my experience, I'd reach for Gemini 2.0 Flash over 4o

Why not use o1-mini?

Re: Gemini 2.0 is now available to everyone

#80

Post by simonw »

I upgraded my llm-gemini plugin to handle this, and shared the results of my "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" benchmark here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/5/gemini-2/

The pricing is interesting: Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite is 7.5c/million input tokens and 30c/million output tokens - half the price of OpenAI's GPT-4o mini (15c/60c).

Gemini 2.0 Flash isn't much more: 10c/million for text/image input, 70c/million for audio input, 40c/million for output. Again, cheaper than GPT-4o mini.

Post reply on HN