Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Gemini 2.0 is now available to everyone. Big new Gemini 2.0 releases today:

  • Gemini 2.0 Pro (Experimental) is Google's "best model yet for coding performance and complex prompts" - currently available as a free preview.
  • Gemini 2.0 Flash is now generally available.
  • Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite looks particularly interesting:

    We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on the price and speed of 1.5 Flash. We wanted to keep improving quality, while still maintaining cost and speed. So today, we’re introducing 2.0 Flash-Lite, a new model that has better quality than 1.5 Flash, at the same speed and cost. It outperforms 1.5 Flash on the majority of benchmarks.

That means Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite is priced at 7.5c/million input tokens and 30c/million output tokens - half the price of OpenAI's GPT-4o mini (15c/60c).

Gemini 2.0 Flash isn't much more expensive: 10c/million for text/image input, 70c/million for audio input, 40c/million for output. Again, cheaper than GPT-4o mini.

I pushed a new LLM plugin release, llm-gemini 0.10, adding support for the three new models:

llm install -U llm-gemini
llm keys set gemini
# paste API key here
llm -m gemini-2.0-flash "impress me"
llm -m gemini-2.0-flash-lite-preview-02-05 "impress me"
llm -m gemini-2.0-pro-exp-02-05 "impress me"

Here's the output for those three prompts.

I ran Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle through the three new models. Here are the results, cheapest to most expensive:

gemini-2.0-flash-lite-preview-02-05

This is not great. The bicycle is a trapezoid. The pelican is very warped and has a orange diamond beak above its head.

gemini-2.0-flash

The bicycle is better but the pelican is yellow and looks more like a baby chick. Its beak is squashed against the side of the image.

gemini-2.0-pro-exp-02-05

This one is pleasingly avant-garde. The bicycle does at least have two wheels joined by a frame. The pelican is a fun shape, and it has a beak with a curved orange top and a curved yellow bottom.

Full transcripts here.