Google's new Gemini 1.5 Flash AI model is lighter than Gemini Pro
Google announced updates to its Gemini family of AI models at I/O, the company’s annual conference for developers, on Tuesday. It’s rolling out a new model called Gemini 1.5 Flash, which it says is optimized for speed and efficiency.
Gemini 1.5 Flash Features
According to Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, Gemini 1.5 Flash excels at summarization, chat applications, image and video captioning, data extraction from long documents and tables, and more. Google created Gemini 1.5 Flash in response to the need for a lighter and less expensive model compared to the Pro version.
Hassabis highlighted that Gemini 1.5 Pro, announced earlier, is more efficient and powerful than the original Gemini model from last year. Gemini 1.5 Flash, positioned between Pro and Nano versions, manages to be lighter while retaining its power through a process called “distillation”.
This process transfers essential knowledge and skills from Gemini 1.5 Pro to the smaller Flash model, giving it multimodal capabilities and a long context window capable of processing vast amounts of data at once.
Gemini 1.5 Flash for Developers
Google emphasized that Gemini 1.5 Flash, like the Pro version, is targeted at developers rather than consumers. It provides a faster and more cost-effective solution for building AI products and services utilizing Google's technology.
Upgrades to Gemini 1.5 Pro
In addition to launching Gemini 1.5 Flash, Google announced enhancements to the Gemini 1.5 Pro model. These include improved abilities in writing code, reasoning, parsing audio, and images. The company has plans to double the model’s context window to two million tokens later this year, expanding its data processing capabilities significantly.
Availability
Both Gemini 1.5 Flash and Pro are now available in public preview on Google’s AI Studio and Vertex AI platforms. Google also introduced a new version of its Gemma open model, named Gemma 2. These updates are primarily geared towards developers and enthusiasts interested in AI app development.
For more updates on Google I/O 2024, click here.
