Google's AI model just got faster with Gemini 1.5 Flash

Gemini is getting a facelift.

Sundar Pichai announced updates to Google's AI model at the company's annual Google I/O event on May 14, including updates to Gemini 1.5 Pro and a new model of Google Gemini called Gemini 1.5 Flash. 

"We want everyone to benefit from what Gemini can do," Pichai said.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Gemini 1.5 Pro was originally announced in February, but the company announced at I/O that it's getting a bit of an update with new API features like video frame extraction, parallel function calling, and context caching. Pro will help support AI Overviews, Ask Photos, NotebookLM, and more. In the seemingly perpetual fight to the front of the AI world, Gemini 1.5 Pro is an invaluable resource for Google, which plans to use the AI model as the basis for Pixie — the new version of the Google Assistant — and other Google products.

And there's a new member to Google's family of AI models, showing the world a new model: Gemini 1.5 Flash. It has much of the same capabilities as 1.5 Pro but should run faster and more efficiently due to lower latency and a lower cost to serve.

As Josh Woodward, the senior director of product management inside Google's Labs incubator group, said at I/O, Gemini 1.5 Pro is for "complex and general tasks" and "high-quality responses," while Gemini 1.5 Flash is for "high-frequency and narrow tasks" and "fastest response time." Both of the products are "natively multimodal," which means you can prompt them with text, images, audio, and video.

"Today, we're introducing Gemini 1.5 Flash," Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind who introduced Flash, said. "Flash is a lighter-weight model compared to Pro. It's designed to be fast and cost-efficient to serve at scale while still featuring multi-model reasoning capabilities and breakthrough long context."

In a blog post, Hassabis said Gemini 1.5 Flash "excels at summarization, chat applications, image and video captioning, data extraction from long documents and tables, and more."

You can give both Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Flash today globally in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI. Developers can sign up to try two million tokens by heading to ai.google.dev/gemini-api. Gemini 1.5 Pro is $7 for one million tokens, but for prompts up to 128,000, it's just $3.50 for one million tokens. Gemini 1.5 Flash will start at $0.35 for one million tokens up to 128,000.

"We're so excited to see what all of you will create with it," Hassabis said.