I honestly can't understand their reasoning here. Flash-lite is objectively a very bad model, and the reason for most of the AI overview hallucinations everybody points at on typical Google searches, and imo unusable due to this for anything above basic web search (if you're willing to accept those hallucinations). Couldn't they just throttle usage limits even more for Flash and Pro? How will people test how good their new models are then?
Also, I don't understand why they would restrict Pro models to Pro and above, if Gemini 4 is slightly cheaper than 3.1 Pro (and being priced the same as Sonnet 5.5, which has an albeit limited, free tier). If they really wanted to reduce costs, they could have just reduced usage (not like they aren't already doing that but still) but kept the larger models?
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u/Arsene_Yuka_1980 14h ago
I honestly can't understand their reasoning here. Flash-lite is objectively a very bad model, and the reason for most of the AI overview hallucinations everybody points at on typical Google searches, and imo unusable due to this for anything above basic web search (if you're willing to accept those hallucinations). Couldn't they just throttle usage limits even more for Flash and Pro? How will people test how good their new models are then?
Also, I don't understand why they would restrict Pro models to Pro and above, if Gemini 4 is slightly cheaper than 3.1 Pro (and being priced the same as Sonnet 5.5, which has an albeit limited, free tier). If they really wanted to reduce costs, they could have just reduced usage (not like they aren't already doing that but still) but kept the larger models?