Gemini 1.5 Flash powers Gemini AI chatbot, launches on Messages in Europe

Google has just announced perhaps its yet most important update to the Gemini AI chatbot. The Mountain View tech giant said that the Gemini 1.5 Flash model, a smaller model, to power the chatbot’s unpaid version to deliver high-quality responses in over 40 languages and 230 regions.

The model, announced at Google I/O in May alongside Gemini in Google Photos, also increases the context window to 32K tokens, allowing the AI to process more text at once. It improves response speed, reasoning, and image understanding capabilities, and the upgrade is now available on both web and mobile versions of Gemini.

It’s a big jump from Gemini 1.0 Pro, the previous model. Its premium offering, Gemini Advanced, is powered by Gemini Ultra model.

“Gemini now gives you access to 1.5 Flash, our model optimized for speed and efficiency. 1.5 Flash has a 4x-longer context window (from 8K tokens to 32K tokens) compared to 1.0 Pro and improved overall response quality and accuracy,” Google says in the Gemini update log.

Additionally, Gemini will now display links to related content for fact-seeking prompts and will gradually be integrated into Google Messages in Europe, the UK, and Switzerland.

You can chat with Gemini directly within the Messages app by clicking the “Start chat” button. This update allows for drafting messages, brainstorming ideas, and planning events without leaving the app. Additionally, the Gemini mobile app is expanding to more countries for on-the-go assistance.

OpenAI, on the other hand, has also launched a small model for simpler tasks. Billed as GPT-4o mini, the Microsoft-backed company said that it’s better than other smaller models in the market like Claude Haiku and Gemini Flash. It scores 82% on MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding), 87% on MGSM for math reasoning, and 87.2% on HumanEval for coding performance.