Gemini ending free use of Flash and Pro models

A comment that caught my eye:

    this means even on my tablet I'm gonna be stuck turning my smart lights on and off with Gemini flash lite. So many times when I've run out of COMPUTE, it's reduced itself to flash lite And it would just spit out nonsense BS saying that it can't turn the lights on or off, or it can't set calendar events, when I know for a fact that it can. I'm really looking forward to having to fight to get my bedroom lights to turn on every night now.

This is what happens when you give people a valuable service for free. You can't take it away without a lot of complaining and loss of good will.

Flash-lite is pretty capable and getting that entirely for free is not a bad deal at all.

It was always obvious Google couldn't keep letting non-paying users use Flash and Pro.

I'm not a fan of how they bundled their plans but they're not too bad especially when shared with a family. I think I've got almost 1TB of Google Photos at this point.

This is a much better page than TFA: https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/17004136

That's what they want you to pay for:

https://share.gemini.google/r9T9GPuC0Cjc

I think this move will be part of a more global trend when other AI companies get publicly traded.

Because model providers have no moat, and the price of inference is quite large compared to just search, providing it for free makes no sense.

Right now, the goal of the free chatgpt and claude tiers is to accustom more people to AI, to create a new market, not to capture customers.

This strategy makes sense for start-ups with a lot of funding, but not for companies that need to be profitable. Apart from google, no large company is providing free inference to their large models in a consumer app (apart from meta maybe).

Flash and Pro models are moving to paid plans, free users will only get Flash-Lite. Flash-Lite is the same model used by the Android phone Gemini app and AI Overviews in Google Search, which is very poor at reasoning and makes many errors.

Personally, I've been using the free plan quite a lot and never hit a rate limit, but noticed the quality dropping. Pro was almost never available. Perhaps they aren't able to deliver a good quality Flash model to free users.

Google Gemini API use also moved to prepaid-only starting this month.

There might be a connection

I understand why would would move Pro variant behind paywall, you don’t get many uses of it anymore on free tier. But moving the Flash version behind paywall is kinda crazy.

Did we forget what Flash was meant for? I have tried Flash-lite, in my tests, almost all the recent models we have today are good and enough for most daily tasks.

Flash-lite is one of the few models available that is easy to notice its flaws. Its good to summarize data (for example search results), that’s it.

Fine, but can they at least update the models accessible from the various locations?

gemini.google.com/app runs a mixture of 3.1 and 3.6 while 3.8 is in aistudio

Really would have thought there is an incentive to move everything to one model generation to get scaling efficiency

I'm always amazed how entitled people are these days for free stuff. That being said, it does show costs are piling up for these AI companies if even Google is restricting free access to a relatively smaller model amid the AI hype train. Good!

what happens to the aistudio.google.com thing? :)

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