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Comment by hagen8

12 hours ago

Just switch the model, its not that much effort tbh. And u can also get a cheaper model than 2.5 lite for the same intelligence

its not always that simple. dropping in a new model is trivial, but highly specific workflows may rely on specific _invisible_ aspects of a model. when that model gets deprecated, the workflow needs to be rebuilt/re-tuned to work with a different model.

google's inability or unwillingness to provide stable timelines for model deprecation makes it risky to build complex workflows using their models

  • Load-bearing (whoops) quirks were noticeable months back, but haven't most flagship models become predictable and reliable?

    • it does seem to be moving in that direction. There were really specific things (large, complex json outputs) that gemini-2.5 flash was basically the only model that seemed capable of reliably for a long period. gpt-5+ has covered the usecase for us now pretty well but still evals slightly below what 2.5 could do

You would be surprised how much of a difference the model makes for certain niche tasks.

For my use case, `gemini-3.1-flash-lite` is ~20% higher accuracy than the next best model of comparable cost (considering both proprietary and open-weight alternatives)

  • Well it is a bit surprising that 3.1 flash-lite could be better than deepseek-v4-pro (cheaper output and way cheaper cache so might cost less for quite a few use cases).

    They are not anywhere close according to pretty much every benchmark (even v4-flash is considerably ahead and its way cheaper than flash-lite). Maybe tuning prompts/tools/etc. might be useful?

    • Gemini flash lite family of models currently has the best ratio for price/speed/intelligence for understanding images, no real alternative AFAIK

"Intelligence" being what, math? Coding? Unfortunately there's a billion use cases for LLMs whose performance is not at all captured by the popular benchmarks they're all trying to maxx.

  • if you are relying on a model for a business process, it should be simple enough to benchmark on that process