Google rolls out cheaper AI model as industry scrutinizes costs

In addition to Flash-Lite, Google has made Gemini 2.0 Flash generally available after a developer preview in December and has begun testing an updated version of its flagship “Pro” model.

The updated Gemini 2.0 Flash would be available via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI, allowing developers to build production applications with 2.0 Flash.

“The Flash series of models is popular with developers as a powerful workhorse model, optimal for high-volume, high-frequency tasks at scale and highly capable of multimodal reasoning across vast amounts of information with a context window of 1 million tokens,” Google said. “2.0 Flash is now generally available to more people across our AI products, alongside improved performance in key benchmarks, with image generation and text-to-speech coming soon.”

Flash-Lite 2 features a 1-million token context window and supports multimodal input, similar to Flash 2, Google added. It can generate captions for around 40,000 unique images at a cost of less than a dollar on Google AI Studio’s paid tier.