Gemini 1.5 Flash is an Underrated Gem You Need to Try Right Now: Here’s How

At the I/O 2024, Google announced several new AI models, upcoming projects, and a plethora of AI features coming across its products. However, what caught my attention was theGemini 1.5 Flashmodel. It’s an impressively fast and efficient model that bringsmultimodal capabilityand a context window of up to 1 million tokens (2M via waitlist).

Despite the small size of Gemini 1.5 Flash — Google has not disclosed its parameter size — it achieves great scores across all modalities —text, vision, and audio. In theGemini 1.5 technical report, Google disclosed that Gemini 1.5 Flash outperforms much larger models like 1.0 Ultra and 1.0 Pro in many aspects. Only in speech recognition and translation, it lags behind the larger models.

Unlike Gemini 1.5 Pro which is a sparse MoE model (Mixture of Experts), Gemini 1.5 Flash is a dense model, onlinedistilled from the larger 1.5 Promodel for improved quality. In terms of speed as well, the Flash model outperforms all smaller models out there includingClaude 3 Haiku, running on Google’s custom TPU.

And its pricing is unbelievably low. Gemini 1.5 Flash costs $0.35 for input and $0.53 for output to process 128K tokens. $0.70 and $1.05 for 1 million tokens. It’smuch cheaperthanLlama 3 70B, Mistral Medium, GPT-3.5 Turbo, and of course, larger models.

If you are a developer and need multimodal reasoning with a larger context window for cheap, you should definitely check out the Flash model. Here is how you can try Gemini 1.5 Flash for free.

How to Use Gemini 1.5 Flash For Free

First Impression of Gemini 1.5 Flash

While Gemini 1.5 Flash is not a state-of-the-art model, its advantage is breakneck speed, efficiency. and low cost. Itranks below Gemini 1.5 Proin terms of capabilities and other larger models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Nevertheless, I tried some of the reasoning prompts that I used tocompare ChatGPT 4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro.

It could only generateone correct response out of fivequestions. It might not be very smart at commonsense reasoning, but for other applications that require multimodal capability and a large context window, it might fit your use case. Also, Gemini models are very good at creative tasks which can be of value to developers and users.

Simply put, there is no AI model out there that isfast, efficient, offers multimodality, and has a large context window with near-perfect recall. On top of that, it’s insanely cheap to run. So what is your opinion on Google’s latest Flash model? Let us know in the comments below.

Arjun Sha

Passionate about Windows, ChromeOS, Android, security and privacy issues. Have a penchant to solve everyday computing problems.

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