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Gemini 2.5 Flash

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#131

Post by zoogeny »

Google making Gemini 2.5 Pro (Experimental) free was a big deal. I haven't tried the more expensive OpenAI models so I can't even compare, only to the free models I have used of theirs in the past.

Gemini 2.5 Pro is so much of a step up (IME) that I've become sold on Google's models in general. It not only is smarter than me on most of the subjects I engage with it, it also isn't completely obsequious. The model pushes back on me rather than contorting itself to find a way to agree.

100% of my casual AI usage is now in Gemini and I look forward to asking it questions on deep topics because it consistently provides me with insight. I am building new tools with the mind to optimize my usage to increase it's value to me.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#132

Post by jiocrag »

peterjliu wrote: post #121
mmaunder wrote: post #93

More great innovation from Google. OpenAI have two major problems. The first is Google's vertically integrated chip pipeline and deep supply chain and operational knowledge when it comes to creating AI chips and putting them into production. They have a massive cost advantage at every step. This translates into more free services, cheaper paid services, more capabilities due to more affordable compute, and far more g…

another advantage is people want the Google bot to crawl their pages, unlike most AI companies

Excellent point. If they can figure out how to either remunerate or drive traffic to third parties in conjunction with this, it would be huge.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#133

Post by arnaudsm »

JeremyNT wrote: post #107
arnaudsm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I was talking of B2B APIs for my YC startup. Gemini is still far behind for consumers indeed.

I use Gemini almost exclusively as a normal user. What am I missing out on that they are far behind on? It seems shockingly good and I've watched it get much better up to 2.5 Pro.

Mostly brand recognition and the earlier Geminis had more refusals.

As a consumer, I also really miss the Advanced voice mode of ChatGPT, which is the most transformative tech in my daily life. It's the only frontier model with true audio-to-audio.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#134

Post by gregorygoc »

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.

Is there a website with off the shelf prompts that work?

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#135

Post by jiocrag »

brightball wrote: post #26
statements wrote: post #12

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?

Not at all. The model weights and training data remain the same, it's just RAG'ing real-time twitter data into its context window when returning results. It's like a worse version of Perplexity.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#136

Post by eastbound »

Keyframe wrote: post #113
mmaunder wrote: post #93

More great innovation from Google. OpenAI have two major problems. The first is Google's vertically integrated chip pipeline and deep supply chain and operational knowledge when it comes to creating AI chips and putting them into production. They have a massive cost advantage at every step. This translates into more free services, cheaper paid services, more capabilities due to more affordable compute, and far more g…

Google has the data and has the hardware, not to mention software and infrastructure talent. Once this Bismarck turns around and it looks like it is, who can parry it for real? They have internet.zip and all the previous versions as well, they have youtube, email, search, books, traffic, maps and business on it, phones and habits around it, even the OG social network, the usenet. It's a sleeping giant starting to wak…

They have the Excel spreadsheets of all startups and businesses of the world (well 50/50 with Microsoft).

And Atlassian has all the project data.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#137

Post by Workaccount2 »

whyenot wrote: post #114
mmaunder wrote: post #93

More great innovation from Google. OpenAI have two major problems. The first is Google's vertically integrated chip pipeline and deep supply chain and operational knowledge when it comes to creating AI chips and putting them into production. They have a massive cost advantage at every step. This translates into more free services, cheaper paid services, more capabilities due to more affordable compute, and far more g…

Another advantage that Google has is the deep integration of Gemini into Google Office products and Gmail. I was part of a pilot group and got to use a pre-release version and it's really powerful and not something that will be easy for OpenAI to match.

I frankly am in doubt of future office products. In the last month I have ditched two separate excel productivity templates in favor of bespoke wrappers on sqlite databases, written by Claude and Gemini. Easier to use and probably 10x as fast.

You don't need a 50 function swiss army knife when your pocket can just generate the exact tool you need.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#138

Post by mdp2021 »

zoogeny wrote: post #116
mmaunder wrote: post #93

More great innovation from Google. OpenAI have two major problems. The first is Google's vertically integrated chip pipeline and deep supply chain and operational knowledge when it comes to creating AI chips and putting them into production. They have a massive cost advantage at every step. This translates into more free services, cheaper paid services, more capabilities due to more affordable compute, and far more g…

If the battle was between Altman and Pichai I'd have my doubts. But the battle is between Altman and Hassabis. I recall some advice on investment from Buffett regarding how he invests in the management team.

Could you please expand, on both your points?

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#139

Post by minimaxir »

One hidden note from Gemini 2.5 Flash when diving deep into the documentation: for image inputs, not only can the model be instructed to generated 2D bounding boxes of relevant subjects, but it can also create segmentation masks! https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/image-understanding#se...

At this price point with the Flash model, creating segmentation masks is pretty nifty.

The segmentation masks are a bit of a galaxy brain implementation by generating a b64 string representing the mask: https://colab.research.google.com/github/google-gemini/cookb...

I am trying to test it in AI Studio but it sometimes errors out, likely because it tries to decode the b64 lol.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#140

Post by jsnell »

mwest217 wrote: post #83
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 bu…

The free-with-small-rate-limits designator was "experimental", not "preview".

I think the distinction between preview and full release is that the preview models have no guarantees on how long they'll be available, the full release comes with a pre-set discontinuation date. So if want the stability for a production app, you wouldn't want to use a preview model.

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