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Gemini 2.5 Flash

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#51

Post by jsnell »

byefruit wrote: post #3

It's interesting that there's a price nearly 6x price difference between reasoning and no reasoning. This implies it's not a hybrid model that can just skip reasoning steps if requested. Anyone know what else they might be doing? Reasoning means contexts will be longer (for thinking tokens) and there's an increase in cost to inference with a longer context but it's not going to be 6x. Or is it just market pricing?

> This implies it's not a hybrid model that can just skip reasoning steps if requested.

It clearly is, since most of the post is dedicated to the tunability (both manual and automatic) of the reasoning budget.

I don't know what they're doing with this pricing, and the blog post does not do a good job explaining.

Could it be that they're not counting thinking tokens as output tokens (since you don't get access to the full thinking trace anyway), and this is the basically amortizing the thinking tokens spend over the actual output tokens? Doesn't make sense either, because then the user has no incentive to use anything except 0/max thinking budgets.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#52

Post by vessenes »

ein0p wrote: post #18

Absolutely decimated on metrics by o4-mini, straight out of the gate, and not even that much cheaper on output tokens (o4-mini's thinking can't be turned off IIRC).

o4-mini costs 8x as much as 2.5 flash. I believe its useful context window is also shorter, although I haven't verified this directly.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#53

Post by kccqzy »

ein0p wrote: post #33
Workaccount2 wrote: post #10

OpenAI might win the college students but it looks like Google will lock in enterprise.

How will it lock in the enterprise if its market share of enterprise customers is half that of Azure (Azure also sells OpenAI inference, btw), and one third that of AWS?

The same reason why people enjoy BigQuery enough that their only use of GCP is BigQuery while they put their general compute spend on AWS.

In other words, I believe talking about cloud market share as a whole is misleading. One cloud could have one product that's so compelling that people use that one product even when they use other clouds for more commoditized products.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#54

Post by [deleted] »

byefruit wrote: post #3

It's interesting that there's a price nearly 6x price difference between reasoning and no reasoning. This implies it's not a hybrid model that can just skip reasoning steps if requested. Anyone know what else they might be doing? Reasoning means contexts will be longer (for thinking tokens) and there's an increase in cost to inference with a longer context but it's not going to be 6x. Or is it just market pricing?

[deleted]

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#55

Post by mupuff1234 »

ein0p wrote: post #18

Absolutely decimated on metrics by o4-mini, straight out of the gate, and not even that much cheaper on output tokens (o4-mini's thinking can't be turned off IIRC).

Not sure "decimated" is a fitting word for "slightly higher performance on some benchmarks".

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#56

Post by bsmith »

transformi wrote: post #7

Bad day is going on google. First the decleration of illegal monopoly.. and now... Google’s latest innovation: programmable overthinking. With Gemini 2.5 Flash, you too can now set a thinking_budget—because nothing says "state-of-the-art AI" like manually capping how long it’s allowed to reason. Truly the dream: debugging a production outage at 2am wondering if your LLM didn’t answer correctly because you cheaped out…

Using AI to debug code at 2am sounds like pure insanity.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#58

Post by midasz »

drusepth wrote: post #36
BoredPositron wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The API is free, and it's great for everyday tasks. So yes there is no better bang for the buck.

Wait, the API is free? I thought you had to use their web interface for it to be free. How do you use the API for free?

I use Gemini 2.5 pro experimental via openrouter in my openwebui for free. Was using sonnet 3.7 but I don't notice much difference so just default to the free thing now.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#59

Post by kccqzy »

xbmcuser wrote: post #50

For a non programmer like me google is becoming shockingly good. It is giving working code the first time. I was playing around with it asked it to write code to scrape some data of a website to analyse. I was expecting it to write something that would scrape the data and later I would upload the data to it to analyse. But it actually wrote code that scraped and analysed the data. It was basic categorizing and counti…

That's the opposite experience of my wife who's in tech but also a non programmer. She wanted to ask Gemini to write code to do some basic data analysis things in a more automated way than Excel. More than once, Gemini wrote a long bash script where some sed invocations are just plain wrong. More than once I've had to debug Gemini-written bash scripts. As a programmer I knew how bash scripts aren't great for readability so I told my wife to ask Gemini to write Python. It resulted in higher code quality, but still contained bugs that are impossible for a non programmer to fix. Sometimes asking a follow up about the bugs would cause Gemini to fix it, but doing so repeatedly will result in Gemini forgetting what's being asked or simply throwing an internal error.

Currently IMO you have to be a programmer to use Gemini to write programs effectively.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#60

Post by gambiting »

arnaudsm wrote: post #6

Gemini flash models have the least hype, but in my experience in production have the best bang for the buck and multimodal tooling. Google is silently winning the AI race.

In my experience they are as dumb as a bag of bricks. The other day I asked "can you edit a picture if I upload one"

And it replied "sure, here is a picture of a photo editing prompt:"

https://g.co/gemini/share/5e298e7d7613

It's like "baby's first AI". The only good thing about it is that it's free.

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