You can now try new lightweight Gemini 1.5 Flash on Google AI Studio & Vertex AI

Google arrived big on Tuesday at the Google I/O 2024 event. Besides announcing Gemini in Google Photos, the Mountain View tech giant also announced the new, smaller Gemini 1.5 Flash model. 

Gemini 1.5 Flash is an addition to Google’s Gemini family. This lightweight model is designed for tasks like summarizing, chat apps, image, and video captioning, and even data processing from long documents and tables, with less cost than its older sisters. It is now available in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI.

Google launched Gemini 1.5 Pro a little while ago in February. It runs up to 1 million tokens, and now, a 2M token version is coming soon for developers to try. Gemini 1.5 Flash is for fast results when speed matters, while Gemini 1.5 Pro is for complex tasks requiring multi-step reasoning.

Besides the 2 million tokens, the Pro version gets improvement in coding, reasoning, and audio and image parsing capabilities. You can now process massive data, like two hours of video, 22 hours of audio, over 60,000 lines of code, or over 1.4 million words. In Josh Woodward, Google Labs’ VP’s words, it is “more general or complex, often multi-step reasoning tasks.”

“Developers can move between the different sizes, depending on the use case. That’s why it’s got the same multimodal input abilities, the same long context, and, of course, runs as well in the same sort of backend,” he says further.

Gemini 1.5 Flash arrived just in time after Microsoft-backed OpenAI announced GPT-4o, its latest model yet, which is rolling out to both free and paid users. A ChatGPT desktop app is also coming to macOS with a Windows version launching later this year.