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Gemini 2.5 Flash

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#61

Post by alecco »

Gemini models are very good but in my experience they tend to overdo the problems. When I give it things for context and something to rework, Gemini often reworks the problem.

For software it is barely useful because you want small commits for specific fixes not a whole refactor/rewrite. I tried many prompts but it's hard. Even when I give it function signatures of the APIs the code I want to fix uses, Gemini rewrites the API functions.

If anybody knows a prompt hack to avoid this, I'm all ears. Meanwhile I'm staying with Claude Pro.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#62

Post by swyx »

xnx wrote: post #2

50% price increase from Gemini 2.0 Flash. That sounds like a lot, but Flash is still so cheap when compared to other models of this (or lesser) quality. https://developers.googleblog.com/en/start-building-with-gem...

done pretty much inline with the price elo pareto frontier https://x.com/swyx/status/1912959140743586206/photo/1

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#63

Post by mccraveiro »

vessenes wrote: post #52
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.

2.5 flash with reasoning is just 20% cheaper than o4-mini

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#64

Post by sbarre »

kccqzy wrote: post #59
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 readabil…

I've found that good prompting isn't just about asking for results but also giving hints/advice/direction on how to go about the work.

I suspect that if Gemini is giving you bash scripts it's because you're note giving it enough direction. As you pointed out, telling it to use Python, or giving it more expectations about how to go about the work or how the output should be, will give better results.

When I am prompting for technical or data-driven work, I tend to almost walk through what I imagine the process would be, including steps, tools, etc...

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#66

Post by rendang »

hmaxwell wrote: post #8

I did some testing this morning: Prompt: "can you find any mistakes on my codebase? I put one in there on purpose" + 70,000 tokens of codebase where in one line I have an include for a non-existent file. Claude 3.7 Sonnet (Try 1 - new chat) Claimed it Found a race condition in the api of the admin interface that would be triggered if two admins were to change the room order at the same time. Claude suggested I group…

3 different answers in 3 tries for Claude? Makes me curious how many times you'd get the same answer if you asked 10/20/100 times

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#67

Post by ks2048 »

If this announcement is targeting people not up-to-date on the models available, I think they should say what "flash" means. Is there a "Gemini (non-flash)"?

I see the 4 Google model names in the chart here. Are these 4 the main "families" of models to choose from?

- Gemini-Pro-Preview

- Gemini-Flash-Preview

- Gemini-Flash

- Gemini-Flash-Lite

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#69

Post by rvz »

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.

Google always has been winning the AI race as soon as DeepMind was properly put to use to develop their AI models, instead of the ones that built Bard (Google AI team).

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#70

Post by superfrank »

pydry wrote: post #37
superfrank wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there really lock in with AI models? I built a product that uses and LLM and I got curious about the quality of the output from different models. It took me a weekend to go from just using OpenAI's API to having Gemini, Claude, and DeepSeek all as options and a lot of that time was research on what model from each provider that I wanted to use.

For enterprise practically any SaaS gets used as one more thing to lock them into a platform they already have a relationship with (either AWS, GCP or Azure). It's actually pretty dangerous for the industry to have this much vertical integration. Tech could end up like the car industry.

I'm aware of that. I'm an EM for a large tech company that sells multiple enterprise SaaS product.

You're right that the lock in happens because of relationships, but most big enterprise SaaS companies have relationships with multiple vendors. My company relationships with AWS, Azure, and GCP and we're currently using products from all of them in different products. Even on my specific product we're using all three.

When you've already got those relationships, the lock in is more about switching costs. The time it takes to switch, the knowledge needed to train people internally on the differences after the switch, and the actual cost of the new service vs the old one.

With AI models the time to switch from OpenAI to Gemini is negligible and there's little retraining needed. If the Google models (now or in the future) are comparable in price and do a better job than OpenAI models, I don't see where the lock in is coming from.

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