the 1.5 and 2.0 flash models were absolute beasts. They were very cheap, and _very_ fast. We contemplated moving some of our fine tuned workloads to them because we would have gotten very substantial total latency reductions for our workloads.

However, they are aggressively deprecating them (OpenAI is as well), and replacing with newer models. These newer models are all reasoning models, and importantly, only bear the flash name. They are not fast. And they are very expensive!