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Improved Gemini 2.5 Flash and Flash-Lite

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Improved Gemini 2.5 Flash and Flash-Lite

#71

Post by gnulinux »

brap wrote: post #26

Am I the only one who is starting to feel the Gemini Flash models are better than Pro? Flash is super fast, gets straight to the point. Pro takes ages to even respond, then starts yapping endlessly, usually confuses itself in the process and ends up with a wrong answer.

This is not my experience. In my experience Gemini 2.5 Pro is the best model in every use-case I tried. There are a few very hard (graduate level) logic or math problems that Claude 4.1 Opus edged-out over Gemini 2.5 Pro, but in general if you have no idea which model will perform best on a difficult question, imho Gemini 2.5 Pro is a safer bet especially since it's significantly cheaper. Gemini 2.5 Flash is really good but imho not nearly as good as Pro in (1) research math (2) creative/artistic writing (3) open ended programming debugging.

On the other hand, I do prefer using Claude 4 Sonnet on very open-ended agentic programming tasks because it seems to have a better integration with VSCode Copilot. Gemini 2.5 Pro bugs out much more often where Claude works fine almost every time.

Re: Improved Gemini 2.5 Flash and Flash-Lite

#74

Post by simonw »

I added support to these models to my llm-gemini plugin, so you can run them like this (using uvx so no need to install anything first):

  export LLM_GEMINI_KEY='...'
  uvx --isolated --with llm-gemini llm -m gemini-flash-lite-latest 'An epic poem about frogs at war with ducks'
Release notes: https://github.com/simonw/llm-gemini/releases/tag/0.26

Pelicans: https://github.com/simonw/llm-gemini/issues/104#issuecomment...

Re: Improved Gemini 2.5 Flash and Flash-Lite

#75

Post by OGEnthusiast »

daemonologist wrote: post #24
OGEnthusiast wrote: post #4

I'm not even sure how to evaluate what a "better" LLM is, when I've tried running the exact same model (Qwen3) and prompt and gotten vastly different responses on Qwen Chat vs OpenRouter vs running the model locally.

There several reasons responses from the same model might vary: - "temperature" - intentional random sampling from the most likely next tokens to improve "creativity" and help avoid repetition - quantization - running models with lower numeric precision (saves on both memory and compute, without impacting accuracy too much) - differences in/existence of a system prompt, especially when using something end-user-orient…

Thanks, this is a good checklist.

Re: Improved Gemini 2.5 Flash and Flash-Lite

#76

Post by OGEnthusiast »

1899-12-30 wrote: post #6
OGEnthusiast wrote: post #4

I'm not even sure how to evaluate what a "better" LLM is, when I've tried running the exact same model (Qwen3) and prompt and gotten vastly different responses on Qwen Chat vs OpenRouter vs running the model locally.

That's a difference in the system prompt, not the model itself.

True yeah, good point.

Re: Improved Gemini 2.5 Flash and Flash-Lite

#78

Post by pupppet »

minimaxir wrote: post #30

Gemini 2.5 Flash has been the LLM I've used the most recently for a variety of domains, especially image inputs and structured outputs which beat both OpenAI and Anthropic in my opinion.

Gemini 2.5 Flash runs circles around ChatGPT 5 for many of my tasks, I’m surprised it’s not more popular than it is.

Re: Improved Gemini 2.5 Flash and Flash-Lite

#80

Post by yesco »

Mistletoe wrote: post #10
newfocogi wrote: post #3

Non-AI Summary: Both models have improved intelligence on Artificial Analysis index with lower end-to-end response time. Also 24% to 50% improved output token efficiency (resulting in lower cost). Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite improvements include better instruction following, reduced verbosity, stronger multimodal & translation capabilities. Gemini 2.5 Flash improvements include better agentic tool use and more token-effici…

2.5 Flash is the first time I've felt AI has become truly useful to me. I was #1 AI hater but now find myself going to the Gemini app instead of Google search. It's just better in every way and no ads. The info it provides is usually always right and it feels like I have the whole generalized and accurate knowledge of the internet at my fingertips in the app. It's more intimate, less distractions. Just me and the Gem…

It's also excellent for subjective NLP-type analysis. For example, I use it for "scouting" chapters in my translation pipeline to compile coherent glossaries that I can feed into prompts for per-chapter translation.

This involves having it identify all potential keywords and distinct entities, determine their approximate gender (important for languages with ambiguous gender pronouns), and then perform a line-by-line analysis of each chapter. For each line, it identifies the speaking entity, determines whose POV the line represents, and identifies the subject entity. While I didn't need or expect perfection, Gemini Flash 2.5 was the only model I tested that could not only follow all these instructions, but follow them well. The cheap price was a bonus.

I was thoroughly impressed, it's now my go-to for any JSON-formatted analysis reports.

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