Simon Willison’s Weblog

Gemini 1.5 Flash price drop (via) Google Gemini 1.5 Flash was already one of the cheapest models, at 35c/million input tokens. Today they dropped that to just 7.5c/million (and 30c/million) for prompts below 128,000 tokens.

The pricing war for best value fast-and-cheap model is red hot right now. The current most significant offerings are:

• Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash: 7.5c/million input, 30c/million output (below 128,000 input tokens)
• OpenAI's GPT-4o mini: 15c/million input, 60c/million output
• Anthropic's Claude 3 Haiku: 25c/million input, $1.25/million output

Or you can use OpenAI's GPT-4o mini via their batch API, which halves the price (resulting in the same price as Gemini 1.5 Flash) in exchange for the results being delayed by up to 24 hours.

Worth noting that Gemini 1.5 Flash is more multi-modal than the other models: it can handle text, images, video and audio.

Also in today's announcement:

PDF Vision and Text understanding

The Gemini API and AI Studio now support PDF understanding through both text and vision. If your PDF includes graphs, images, or other non-text visual content, the model uses native multi-modal capabilities to process the PDF. You can try this out via Google AI Studio or in the Gemini API.

This is huge. Most models that accept PDFs do so by extracting text directly from the files (see previous notes), without using OCR. It sounds like Gemini can now handle PDFs as if they were a sequence of images, which should open up much more powerful general PDF workflows.

Update: it turns out Gemini also has a 50% off batch mode, so that’s 3.25c/million input tokens for batch mode 1.5 Flash!