🟢 Gemini 1.5 Flash

What is Gemini 1.5 Flash?

Gemini 1.5 Flash is Google's freely available Gemini product, and it was built for speed, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness while still maintaining a high level of performance and reasoning.

At 0.1 USD per token (the lowest out of any model), 194 output tokens per second (the highest out of any model), and an 81% on the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark (at the lower end of the pack but still solid), Gemini 1.5 Flash gets pretty close to Google's goal.

Advantages of Gemini 1.5 Flash

• Multimodal: As always with Gemini models, 1.5 Flash can natively process multiple data types, including text, images, audio, and video, within a single conversation and/or prompt.

• Fast: The closest model to Gemini 1.5 Flash in terms of speed is GPT-4o Mini, which has a mere 99 output tokens per second compared to 1.5 Flash's 194, more than double.

• Large context window: While the publicly available Gemini 1.5 Flash only has a 32k context window, the API version boasts a context window of 1M tokens; that's equivalent to an entire repository of code or a multi-hour lecture.

• Cheap: The Gemini 1.5 Flash API is priced at 0.1 USD per 1M tokens, which is three times cheaper than the second cheapest, GPT-4o Mini.

So while its performance on reasoning benchmarks may be slightly below average, Gemini 1.5 Flash makes up for it with its incredible multimodality, speed, affordability, and context window size.

Comparisons to Other Models

• Gemini 1.5 Pro: Gemini 1.5 Pro is Google's paid version of Gemini, and its API version has a context window of 2 million tokens, compared to Flash's 1 million. Flash is faster and cheaper, at 190 output tokens per second and 0.1 USD per 1M tokens compared to Pro's 59 output tokens per second and 2.2 USD per 1M tokens. Pro is more capable than Flash at reasoning, however, with a score of 86% on the MMLU compared to Flash's 81%.

• Gemma 2 (27B): Gemma 2 has a substantially smaller context window size than Flash, at 8.5k tokens compared to Flash's 1 million. Additionally, Flash is better at reasoning; Gemma 2 only scored a 77% on the MMLU. Since Gemma 2 is priced at $0.30 per 1M tokens and has a speed of 50 output tokens per second, Flash is also cheaper and faster than Gemma 2.

Conclusion

Gemini 1.5 Flash stands out as a highly efficient and cost-effective model from Google, designed to balance speed, performance, and affordability. While it doesn't lead in reasoning benchmarks, its multimodal capabilities, speed, cheap pricing, and context window make it a robust model for everyday tasks.