Live data from Hacker News

Gemini 2.5 Flash

developers.googleblog.com

201–210 of 582 posts

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#201
How is this sustainable for Google from business POV? It feels like Google is shooting itself in the foot while "winning" the AI race.. From my experience I think Google lost 99% of the ads it used to show me before in the search engine.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#202
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.

100% agree. I had Gemini flash 2 chew through thousands of points of nasty unstructured client data and it did a 'better than human intern' level conversion into clean structured output for about $30 of API usage. I am sold. 2.5 pro experimental is a different league though for coding. I'm leveraging it for massive refactoring now and it is almost magical.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#203
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).

Anecdotally o4-mini doesn’t perform as well on video understanding tasks in our pipeline, and also in Cursor it seems really not great.

During one session, it read the same file (same lines) several times, ran ‘python -c ‘print(“skip!”)’’ for no reason, and then got into another file reading loop. Then after asking a hypothetical about the potential performance implications of different ffmpeg flags, it claimed that it ran a test and determined conclusively that one particular set was faster, even though it hadn’t even attempted a tool call, let alone have the results from a test that didn’t exist.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you mean miss? You don’t have the budget to keep something you truly miss for $20? What am in missing here / I don’t mean to criticize I am just curious is all. I would reword but I have to go

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#205

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 push…

More and more people are coming to the realisation that Google is actually winning at the model level right now.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#206
post #201

How is this sustainable for Google from business POV? It feels like Google is shooting itself in the foot while "winning" the AI race.. From my experience I think Google lost 99% of the ads it used to show me before in the search engine.

someone else will do it if they don't

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#207
post #192

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 push…

After comparing Gemini Pro and Claude Sonnet 3.7 coding answers side by side a few times, I decided to cancel my Anthropic subscription and just stick to Gemini.

Google has killed so many amazing businesses -- entire industries, even, by giving people something expensive for free until the competition dies, and then they enshittify hard.

It's cool to have access to it, but please be careful not to mistake corporate loss leaders for authentic products.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#208
post #156

I spotted something interesting in the Python API library code: https://github.com/googleapis/python-genai/blob/473bf4b6b5a6... class ThinkingConfig(_common.BaseModel): """The thinking features configuration.""" include_thoughts: Optional[bool] = Field( default=None, description="""Indicates whether to include thoughts in the response. If true, thoughts are returned only if the model supports thought and thoughts are…

It is gated behind the GOOGLE_INTERNAL visibility flag, which only internal Google projects and Cursor have at the moment as far as I know.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#209
I've been paying for googles pro llm for about six months. At 20 it feels steep considering the free version is very good. I'm a devops work, and it's been very helpful. Ive tried gpt, copilot, Mixtral, Claude, etc and Geminis 1.5 pro was what sold me. The new 2.0 stuff is even better. Anecdotally, Gemini seems to forget to add stuff but doesn't hallucinate as much. I've been doing some pretty complex scripting this last week purely on Gemini fast 2.0 and it's been really really good.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#210
post #56

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.

They're suggesting you'll be up at 2am debugging code because your AI code failed. Not that you'll be using AI to do the debugging.
Post reply on HN