Live data from Hacker News

Gemini 2.5 Flash

developers.googleblog.com

71–80 of 582 posts

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#72
I've been leveraging the services of 3 LLMs, mainly: Meta, Gemini, and Copilot.

It depends on what I'm asking. If I'm looking for answers in the realm of history or culture, religion, or I want something creative such as a cute limerick, or a song or dramatic script, I'll ask Copilot. Currently, Copilot has two modes: "Quick Answer"; or "Think Deeply", if you want to wait about 30 seconds for a good answer.

If I want info on a product, a business, an industry or a field of employment, or on education, technology, etc., I'll inquire of Gemini.

Both Copilot and Gemini have interactive voice conversation modes. Thankfully, they will also write a transcript of what we said. They also eagerly attempt to engage the user with further questions and followups, with open questions such as "so what's on your mind tonight?"

And if I want to know about pop stars, film actors, the social world or something related to tourism or recreation in general, I can ask Meta's AI through [Facebook] Messenger.

One thing I found to be extremely helpful and accurate was Gemini's tax advice. I mean, it was way better than human beings at the entry/poverty level. Commercial tax advisors, even when I'd paid for the Premium Deluxe Tax Software from the Biggest Name, they just went to Google stuff for me. I mean, they didn't even seem to know where stuff was on irs.gov. When I asked for a virtual or phone appointment, they were no-shows, with a litany of excuses. I visited 3 offices in person; the first two were closed, and the third one basically served Navajos living off the reservation.

So when I asked Gemini about tax information -- simple stuff like the terminology, definitions, categories of income, and things like that -- Gemini was perfectly capable of giving lucid answers. And citing its sources, so I could immediately go find the IRS.GOV publication and read it "from the horse's mouth".

Oftentimes I'll ask an LLM just to jog my memory or inform me of what specific terminology I should use. Like "Hey Gemini, what's the PDU for Ethernet called?" and when Gemini says it's a "frame" then I have that search term I can plug into Wikipedia for further research. Or, for an introduction or overview to topics I'm unfamiliar with.

LLMs are an important evolutionary step in the general-purpose "search engine" industry. One problem was, you see, that it was dangerous, annoying, or risky to go Googling around and click on all those tempting sites. Google knew this: the dot-com sites and all the SEO sites that surfaced to the top were traps, they were bait, they were sometimes legitimate scams. So the LLM providers are showing us that we can stay safe in a sandbox, without clicking external links, without coughing up information about our interests and setting cookies and revealing our IPv6 addresses: we can safely ask a local LLM, or an LLM in a trusted service provider, about whatever piques our fancy. And I am glad for this. I saw y'all complaining about how every search engine was worthless, and the Internet was clogged with blogspam, and there was no real information anymore. Well, perhaps LLMs, for now, are a safe space, a sandbox to play in, where I don't need to worry about drive-by-zero-click malware, or being inundated with Joomla ads, or popups. For now.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#73

Interesting to note that this might be the only model with knowledge cut off as recent as 2025 January

Isn't Grok 3 basically real time now?

No LLM is real time, and in fact, even a 2025 cut off isn't entirely realistic. Without guidance to say, a new version of a framework it will frequently "reference" documentation from old versions and use that.

It's somewhat real time when it searches the web, of course that data is getting populated into context rather than in training.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#74
post #59

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 had similar experiences few months back that is why I am saying it is becoming shockingly good the 2.5 is a lot better than the 2.0 version. Another thing I have realized just like google search in the past your query has a lot to do with the results you get. So an example of what you want works at getting better results

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#75
post #62
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

Love that chart! Am I imagining that I saw a version of that somewhere that even showed how the boundary has moved out over time?

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#76
1. The main transformative aspect of LLMs has been in writing code.

2. LLMs have had less transformative aspects in 2025 than we anticipated back in late 2022.

3. LLMs are unlikely to be very transformative to society, even as their intelligence increases, because intelligence is a minor changemaker in society. Bigger changemakers are motivation, courage, desire, taste, power, sex and hunger.

4. LLMs are unlikely to develop these more important traits because they are trained on text, not evolved in a rigamarole of ecological challenges.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#77
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.

Flash models are really good even for an end user because how fast and good performance they have.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#78
post #59

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…

Let's hope that's the case for a while.

I want to be able to just tell chat GPT or whatever to create a full project for me, but I know the moment it can do that without any human intervention, I won't be able to find a job.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not without rate limits, but we do have elevated limits for our accounts through: https://glama.ai/models/gemini-2.5-flash-preview-04-17 So if you just want to run evals, that should do it. Though the first couple of days after a model comes out are usually pretty rough because everyone try to run their evals.

What I am noticing with every new Gemini model that comes out is that the time to first token (TTFT) is not great. I guess it is because they gradually transfer computer power from old models to new models as the demand increases.

If you’re imagining that 2.5Pro gets dynamically loaded during the time to first token, then you’re vastly overestimating what’s physically possible.

It’s more likely a latency-throughput tradeoff. Your query might get put inside a large batch, for example.

Post reply on HN