Developers are loving Google's new Gemini Flash 2.0 so much

Google has recently shipped Gemini Flash 2.0 for developers not too long ago, and it seems like things are looking up for the Mountain View tech giant.

Gemini Flash 2.0 has just reached the top 4 in its first week on the OpenRouter API usage ranking. The leaderboard, which is currently led by Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, reflects its growing popularity among developers.

Flash 2.0 gives a much faster performance and lower costs compared to competitors like OpenAI’s GPT-4o, which currently powers the ChatGPT chatbot. The model has an appeal for tasks like coding assistance, despite some users saying that it could’ve been better by removing restrictions on daily requests and context window size.

Besides Flash 2.0, Google also launched Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite, a cost-effective option for large-scale text output, and Gemini 2.0 Pro for coding and more complex prompts.

These models, which are deemed to be better than Gemini 1.5, feature a 1 million token context window, multimodal input, and a native support tool.

Previously, Google has made its Gemini Flash 2.0 model the default on the Gemini app, replacing older versions like Gemini 1.5 Flash and 1.5 Pro and phasing them out.

The upgrade improves response times, coding assistance, and function-calling abilities, and offers paid users access to enhanced features like a 1M token context window, Deep Research, and upgraded image generation with Imagen 3.

“We now have seven products that reach more than 2 billion users — like Maps, Search and Android. All of them are powered by our AI innovations, and our most recent Gemini models,” Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said during the AI Action Summit in France.