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Ask HN: Did Google kill its enterprise workhorse model?

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Ask HN: Did Google kill its enterprise workhorse model?

#1

Post by waldrews »

Is anyone else in a panic over the Gemini 2.5 model generation (Pro, Flash) being sunset in October before there's even any Pro class model in general availability (with geo restrictions etc.)? Google wants everyone to migrate to 3.x Flash, which beats the older Pro models on the benchmarked tasks, but isn't the same thing as the Pro class on reasoning-heavy tasks like complex reasoning on very large documents (my big use case).

The Gemini family had a distinct niche in document comprehension, with thousand page input documents taking only 300k tokens. Nothing quite like that in OpenAI or Anthropic world, even at more than 10x the token adjusted price. Should we just give up on Google at this point and engineer around the competitors' limits and eat the costs? Totally unnecessary own goal by team Google.

Re: Ask HN: Did Google kill its enterprise workhorse model?

#2

Post by kennywinker »

Sounds like they did. IMO, building your business on anything but open-weight models is a bad idea. Unless you're on the s&p 500 you are an insect to google, anthropic, grok (ew), and openai - and they could crush you at any time without even noticing.

Re: Ask HN: Did Google kill its enterprise workhorse model?

#3

Post by grahamnorton39 »

Might be missing something —- are there any issues with Gemini 3.1 Pro that aren’t there in 2.5?

I agree, though. 2.5 Pro is a great model. Very competent, knows a lot, and can process tons of text (and videos, and images, and audio too iirc?). Basically unlimited access to it too via AI Studio. I used it for processing and transforming bucketloads of data, ingesting masses of transcripts and converting them to flashcards, etc. I’ll be sad to see it go. None of the newer, cheaper, but obviously less intelligent benchmaxxed smaller models really seem to hold a candle to it for lots of things.

Re: Ask HN: Did Google kill its enterprise workhorse model?

#4

Post by waldrews »

grahamnorton39 wrote: post #3

Might be missing something —- are there any issues with Gemini 3.1 Pro that aren’t there in 2.5? I agree, though. 2.5 Pro is a great model. Very competent, knows a lot, and can process tons of text (and videos, and images, and audio too iirc?). Basically unlimited access to it too via AI Studio. I used it for processing and transforming bucketloads of data, ingesting masses of transcripts and converting them to flash…

It's still 'preview' and not generally available, so can't run it for US restricted workloads.

Re: Ask HN: Did Google kill its enterprise workhorse model?

#8

Post by davedx »

Nope. The projects I'm on where we use it, we're carefully migrating to the newer models. Where we can we test with evals to try and get an understanding of how the models have changed.

It's not all roses -- I've seen some regressions -- but generally the 3.x Flash models are pretty great for our use cases.

The great thing about LLMs though is it's incredibly easy to diversify and have fallbacks. But of course that means additional costs, mostly centered around engineering efforts to test and integrate them.

Re: Ask HN: Did Google kill its enterprise workhorse model?

#10

Post by OutOfHere »

As an alternative, it's not a bad idea to first convert each document to markdown via a thinking or agentic LLM. Embedded figures can even be embedded as readable tables or Latex or Mermaid. Do record the name and parameters of the model that performs the conversion. You can then query the markdown using any model with an input token cost that is exactly equal to the encoding of the markdown. For multiple queries you can also use input caching.
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