Please don't discontinue Gemini 2.5 Flash

Yeah IIRC the latest Pro is $12 and Flash is $9 which is not the usual 2X-3X multiplier we see separate model grades. It also puts Flash now about 2X GLM 5.2, which is a highly capable open weight model.

How is that a win for them?

It's not a smell. Why should these developers rebuild a core piece of their stack every few months. Switching out a model requires a new round of testing and validation when we should be able to rely on a piece of software the behave the same way since the last time we touched it.

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!

In the post the issue is performance. Are you saying that getting too attached to performance is a smell? That sounds very odd.

It's not because a model performs better in some applications (often by fine-tuning to get better scores at specific tests) that it is better across the board or that we have to believe the company releasing the model with a high number 3 > 2 so that it is commonly accepted as better.

Pushing the reasonnning further: f you need an Opus level performance then not accepting GPT 3 isn't a smell.

We have benchmarks for our use cases, and every generation after Gemini 2.0 Flash has been a grim hit on price/performance. Costs have gone up, throughput has gone down, and performance has improved very slightly (and regressed on a few things).

That's like saying 'getting attached to locked dependencies for your app is a smell'.

But this could be framed as 'getting attached to an API revision when a new one is available'...

I can see it both ways, tbh.

I built some BigQuery workflows on 2.0 and 2.5 flash lite that are something like 6x more expensive with 3.1 flash lite.

I tried 3 flash for months and it didn’t work using Googles own vertexai integration because it’s been in preview mode for months.

Not wanting to pay significantly more and do a bunch of rework isn’t a smell.

They left a large gap in their new pricing vs the prior generation, and if you had a working use case that sucks. The model is >99% reliable for my use case so there’s nothing to gain from a smarter model.

in this case, the other frontier shops are all doing the same thing, so maybe the advice here should be "don't use closed weight models in production"?

It ain't just google.

i have found google models outperforming other models in actual agentic workflows

Where do people get ideas like this? In what world does this make sense?

You have several choices:

1. Work with a supplier and sign a contract guaranteeing support for whatever period of time you want at a mutually agreeable price

2. Host your own stack to depend on and support it for however long you want

3. Accept that you're paying for a service and that it can go away at any time.

Companies aren't obligated to support things forever and they aren't obligated to open them up when they no longer feel it's worth supporting them. Claiming they should is absurd.

If you paid a one-time fee for an offline model, and then you were revoked access to it, that would apply.

If you are paying an ongoing subscription for a service, I'd advise you not to rely on it too much or keep a list of alternatives.

There are plenty of open weights models available already. If the ability to keep running the same model is important to you, then choose one of those.

because they keep these models loaded, and they can't just arbitrarily load up whatever models you want.

but it's more likely just a business case: they need you buying higher tier model output. They know whose doing what, so someone needs their 3Q bonus.

I was thinking that somebody (Me? No... Somebody.) should start a foundation to start making archive copies of models... not for usage, but because every model is a (somewhat flawed) snapshot of the state of global knowledge as of the time it was trained. In fifty years, you'll be able to talk to Gemini 2.5 flash and get answers from the perspective of 2025. It might be a valuable for historic and sociological research.

Yes, these people did not like 4o going away.

This is one of the most dystopian subreddits:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/

Is it really? A 9B model is equivalent? Honest question, as I haven't spent that much time with the 9B variant or Flash 2.5. But that seems like a pretty bold claim for such a small model. I assumed Flash 2.5 was considerably larger, but maybe I'm wrong?

They appear to be trying lock-in, or some sort of way to make Gemini family the only logical choice on their cloud. They don't offer the most desired open weight models per-token, so we found another vendor and are less likely to use Google services going forward (for more reasons than this)

That, and while you’ve chained yourself to the floor of the littoral zone previously.

And worse, they didn't say please.