Gemini ending free use of Flash and Pro models(reddit.com) |
Gemini ending free use of Flash and Pro models(reddit.com) |
Because model providers have no moat, and the price of inference is quite large compared to just search, providing it for free makes no sense.
Right now, the goal of the free chatgpt and claude tiers is to accustom more people to AI, to create a new market, not to capture customers.
This strategy makes sense for start-ups with a lot of funding, but not for companies that need to be profitable. Apart from google, no large company is providing free inference to their large models in a consumer app (apart from meta maybe).
There might be a connection
Also this is the Flash-Lite model, which they specifically don't want you to pay for.
I mean, sure you can blame Google Maps, but it wasn't my choice to consult Google Maps.
I think noticeable here is how hard it is to steer this trash model even when fed already correct information.
I asked "why closed?" and it corrected me to "it's open" with wrong information. Then it got the current time wrong.
Personally, I've been using the free plan quite a lot and never hit a rate limit, but noticed the quality dropping. Pro was almost never available. Perhaps they aren't able to deliver a good quality Flash model to free users.
gemini.google.com/app runs a mixture of 3.1 and 3.6 while 3.8 is in aistudio
Really would have thought there is an incentive to move everything to one model generation to get scaling efficiency
Did we forget what Flash was meant for? I have tried Flash-lite, in my tests, almost all the recent models we have today are good and enough for most daily tasks.
Flash-lite is one of the few models available that is easy to notice its flaws. Its good to summarize data (for example search results), that’s it.
I've always hated "free" because it sucks the oxygen away from good ideas and redirects money to people who have the connections to get zero risk loans (with no responsibility to pay the principal if things go bad).
What should be illegal is to try to get customers by letting it use for free or at a low price and the jack up prices
OpenAI cancelling the $200/20x and then introducing the $500/25x was basically the canary in the coal mine.
I am looking forward to the 2026 numbers from Anthropic in preperation for their IPO, because that's where the really big numbers are going to be.
If the free stuff is subsidised by ads: noo advertisements are bad!!
Okay but isn't that obvious that's what would happen? Like even if you ask a human, that's where they will consult and if it shows its open, it doesn't really have any incentive to question the validity of the data.
But more so, it is on the management of the plan as well that they have a Google My Business Page but do not update it. If they say its open, why would Google Maps mark it as closed? If it's marked as open on Google Maps, why would Gemini Flash Lite refute that?
Blaming the LLM for this makes little sense imo. Sure it's a dumb model but in this case, it was set up to lose.