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Gemini 2.5 Flash

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#81

Post by JFingleton »

gambiting wrote: post #60
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.

Prompt engineering is a thing.

Learning how to "speak llm" will give you great results. There's loads of online resources that will teach you. Think of it like learning a new API.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#82

Post by RobinL »

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?

Does anyone know how this pricing works? Supposing I have a classification prompt where I need the response to be a binary yes/no. I need one token of output, but reasoning will obviously add far more than 6 additional tokens. Is it still a 6x price multiplier? That doesn't seem to make sense, but not does paying 6x more for every token including reasoning ones

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#83

Post by mwest217 »

ks2048 wrote: post #67

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

Gemini has had 4 families of models, in order of decreasing size:

- Ultra

- Pro

- Flash

- Flash-Lite

Versions with `-Preview` at the end haven't had their "official release" and are technically in some form of "early access" (though I'm not totally clear on exactly what that means given that they're fully available and as of 2.5 Pro Preview, have pricing attached to them - earlier versions were free during Preview but had pretty strict rate limiting but now it seems that Preview models are more or less fully usable).

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#84

Post by ac29 »

xbmcuser wrote: post #74
kccqzy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> I am saying it is becoming shockingly good the 2.5 is a lot better than the 2.0 version

Are you specifically talking about 2.5 Flash? It only came out an hour ago, I dont know how you would have enough experience with it already to come to your conclusion.

(I am very impressed with 2.5 Pro, but that is a different model that's been available for several weeks now)

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#85

Post by drob518 »

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…

IMO, the only thing that’s consistent about AIs is how inconsistent they are. Sometimes, I ask them to write code and I’m shocked at how well it works. Other times, I feel like I’m trying to explain to a 5-year-old Alzheimer’s patient what I want and it just can’t seem to do the simplest stuff. And it’s the same AI in both cases.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#86

Post by ein0p »

rfw300 wrote: post #42
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 does look to be a better model, but this is actually a lot cheaper! It's ~7x cheaper for both input and output tokens.

These small models only make sense with "thinking" enabled. And once you enable that, much of the cost advantage vanishes, for output tokens.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#87

Post by SweetSoftPillow »

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…

It must have something to do with the way your wife is prompting. I've noticed this with my friends too. I usually get working code from Gemini 2.5 Pro on the first try, and with a couple of follow-up prompts, it often improves significantly, while my friends seem to struggle communicating their ideas to the AI and get worse results.

Good news: Prompting is a skill you can develop.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#88

Post by tantalor »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #28
gundmc wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny you should say that. Google just announced today that they are giving all college students one year of free Gemini advanced. I wonder how much that will actually move the needle among the youth.

My guess is that they will use it and still call it "ChatGPT"...

Pass the Kleenex. Can I get a Band-Aid? Here's a Sharpie. I need a Chapstick. Let me Xerox that. Toss me that Frisbee.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#89

Post by byearthithatius »

alecco wrote: post #61

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 rewrite…

Yes, it will add INSANE amounts of "robust error handling" to quick scripts where I can be confident about assumptions. This turns my clean 40 lines of Python where I KNOW the JSONL I am parsing is valid into 200+ lines filled with ten new try except statements. Even when I tell it not to do this, it loves to "find and help" in other ways. Quite annoying. But overall it is pretty dang good. It even spotted a bug I missed the other day in a big 400+ line complex data processing file.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#90

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

SweetSoftPillow wrote: post #87
kccqzy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It must have something to do with the way your wife is prompting. I've noticed this with my friends too. I usually get working code from Gemini 2.5 Pro on the first try, and with a couple of follow-up prompts, it often improves significantly, while my friends seem to struggle communicating their ideas to the AI and get worse results. Good news: Prompting is a skill you can develop.

Or we can just learn to write it ourselves in the same amount of time /shrug
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