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Gemini 2.5 Flash

developers.googleblog.com

231–240 of 582 posts

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#231

Genuine naive question: when it comes to Google HN has generally a negative view of it (pick any random story on Chrome, ads, search, web, working at faang, etc. and this should be obvious from the comments), yet when it comes to AI there is a somewhat notable “cheering effect” for Google to win the AI race that goes beyond a conventional appreciation of a healthy competitive landscape, which may appear as a bit of a…

Maybe because Google is largely responsible, paying for the research, of most of the results we are seeing now. I'm not a Google fan, in the web side, and in their idea of what software engineering is, but they deserve to win the AI race, because right now all the other players provided a lot less than what Google did as public research. Also, with Gemini 2.5 PRO, there was a big hype moment, because the model is of…

Maybe they deserve it but it would be really bad for the world. Because they will enshittify the hell out of it once they're established. That's their MO.

I don't want Google to have a stranglehold over yet another type of online service. So I avoid them.

And things are going so fast now, whatever Google has today that might be better than the rest, in two months the rest will have it too. Of course Google will have something new again. But being 2 months behind isn't a huge deal. I don't have to have the 'winning' product. In fact most of my AI tasks go to an 8b llama 3.1 model. It's about on par with gpt 3.5 but that's fine.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#232

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.

Many types of data have very easily checkable aggregates. Think accounting books.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#233

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…

Except that they train their model even when you pay. So yeah.. I'd rather not use their "evil"

This is false: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#234

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.

You take a sample and check

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>”Google is silently winning the AI race.” It’s not surprising. What was surprising honestly was how they were caught off guard by OpenAI. It feels like in 2022 just about all the big players had a GPT-3 level system in the works internally, but SamA and co. knew they had a winning hand at the time, and just showed their cards first.

True and their first mover advantage still works pretty well. Despite "ChatGPT" being a really uncool name in terms of marketing. People remember it because they were the first to wow them.

It feels more authentically engineer-coded.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#236

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.

In my case I had hundreds of invoices in a not-very-consistent PDF format which I had contemporaneously tracked in spreadsheets. After data extraction (pdftotext + OpenAI API), I cross-checked against the spreadsheets, and for any discrepancies I reviewed the original PDFs and old bank statements.

The main issue I had was it was surprisingly hard to get the model to consistently strip commas from dollar values, which broke the csv output I asked for. I gave up on prompt engineering it to perfection, and just looped around it with a regex check.

Otherwise, accuracy was extremely good and it surfaced a few errors in my spreadsheets over the years.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#237
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.

I've been using Gemini 2.5 and Claude 3.7 for Rust development and I have been very impressed with Claude, which wasn't the case for some architectural discussions where Gemini impressed with it's structure and scope. OpenAI 4.5 and o1 have been disappointing in both contexts.

Gemini doesn't seem to be as keen to agree with me so I find it makes small improvements where Claude and OpenAI will go along with initial suggestions until specifically asked to make improvements.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#238

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…

Same here! It is borderline stubborn at times and I need to prove it wrong. Still, it is the best model to use with Cursor, in my experience.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#239

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.

Though the same logic can be applied to everywhere, right? Even if it's done by human interns, you need to audit everything to be 100% confident or just have some trust on them.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Flash

#240
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.

> Google is silently winning the AI race.

It’s not clear to me what either the “race” or “winning” is.

I use ChatGPT for 99% of my personal and professional use. I’ve just gotten used to the interface and quirks. It’s a good consumer product that I like to pay $20/month for and use. My work doesn’t require much in the way of monthly tokens but I just pay for the OpenAI API and use that.

Is that winning? Becoming the de facto “AI” tool for consumers?

Or is the race to become what’s used by developers inside of apps and software?

The race isn’t to have the best model (I don’t think) because it seems like the 3rd best model is very very good for many people’s uses.

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