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Gemini 2.5 Flash

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Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#221

Post by msp26 »

minimaxir wrote: post #139

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 g…

I've had mixed results with the bounding boxes even on 2.5 pro. On complex images where a lot of boxes need to be drawn they're in the general region but miss the exact location of objects.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#222

Post by [deleted] »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #212
Nihilartikel wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> thousands of points of nasty unstructured client data What I always wonder in these kinds of cases is: What makes you confident the AI actually did a good job since presumably you haven't looked at the thousands of client data yourself? For all you know it made up 50% of the result.

[deleted]

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#223

Post by mark_l_watson »

wcarss wrote: post #207
jeeeb wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In this case, Google is a large investor in Anthropic.

I agree that giving away access to expensive models long term is not a good idea on several fronts. Personally, I subscribe to Gemini Advanced and I pay for using the Gemini APIs.

EDIT: a very good deal, at $10/month is https://apps.abacus.ai/chatllm/ that gives you access to almost all commercial models as well as the best open weight models. I have never come close at all to using my monthly credits with them. If you like to experiment with many models the service is a lot of fun.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#224

Post by bredren »

wcarss wrote: post #207
jeeeb wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(Public) corporate loss leaders? Cause they are all likely corporate.

Also, Anthropic is also subsidizing queries, no? The new “5x” plan illustrative of this?

No doubt anthropic’s chat ux is the best right now, but it isn’t so far ahead on that or holding some UX moat that I can tell.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#225

Post by thimabi »

I find it baffling that Google offers such impressive models through the API and even the free AI Studio with fine-grained control, yet the models used in the Gemini app feel much worse.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been using Gemini Advanced on my Workspace account. There, the models think for shorter times, provide shorter outputs, and even their context window is far from the advertised 1 million tokens. It makes me think that Google is intentionally limiting the Gemini app.

Perhaps the goal is to steer users toward the API or AI Studio, with the free tier that involves data collection for training purposes.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#226

Post by bhl »

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.

It's cheap but also lazy. It sometimes generates empty strings or empty arrays for tool calls, and then I just re-route the request to a stronger model for the tool call.

I've spent a lot of time on prompts and tool-calls to get Flash models to reason and execute well. When I give the same context to stronger models like 4o or Gemini 2.5 Pro, it's able to get to the same answers in less steps but at higher token cost.

Which is to be expected: more guardrails for smaller, weaker models. But then it's a tradeoff; no easy way to pick which models to use.

Instead of SQL optimization, it's now model optimization.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#227

Post by m3kw9 »

zoogeny wrote: post #131

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…

Using Claude code and Codex CLI and then Aider with Gemini 2.5 pro, Aider is much faster because you feed in the files instead of using tools to start doing all kinds of whole know what spending 10x the tokens. I tried a relatively simple refactor which needed around 7 files changed, only Aider with 2.5 got it and in the first shot. Where as both Codex and Claude code completely fumbled it

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#228

Post by msp26 »

simonw wrote: 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…

The API won't give you the "thinking" tokens, those are only visible on AI studio. Probably to try to stop distillation, very disappointing. I find reading the cot to be incredibly informative to identify failure modes.

> Hey Everyone,

> Moving forward, our team has made a decision to only show thoughts in Google AI Studio. Meaning, we no longer return thoughts via the Gemini API. Here is the updated doc to reflect that.

https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/thoughts-are-missing-cot-not...

---

After I wrote all of that I see that the API docs page looks different today and now says:

>Note that a summarized version of the thinking process is available through both the API and Google AI Studio.

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/thinking

Maybe they just updated it? Or people aren't on the same page at Google idk

Previously it said

> Models with thinking capabilities are available in Google AI Studio and through the Gemini API. Note that the thinking process is visible within Google AI Studio but is not provided as part of the API output.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250409174840/https://ai.google...

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#229

Post by blueyes »

jeeeb wrote: post #192
zoogeny wrote: post #131

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.

One of the main advantages Anthropic currently has over Google is the tooling that comes with Claude Code. It may not generate better code, and it has a lower complexity ceiling, but it can automatically find and search files, and figure out how to fix a syntax error fast.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#230

Post by yakz »

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…

Ask it to write tests with the code and then ask it to fix the errors from the tests rather than just pointing out bugs. If you have an IDE that supports tool use (Claude Code, Roo Code) it can automate this process.
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