The Gemini Pro models just don't do it for me. But I still use 2.5 Flash Lite for a lot of my non-coding jobs, super cheap but great performance. I am looking forward to this upgrade!
This is going to be a fun one to play with. I've been conducting tests on various models for my agentic workflow.
I was just wishing they would make a new flash-lite model, these things are so fast. Unfortunately 2.5-flash and therefore 2.5-flash-lite failed some of my agentic workflows.
If 3.1-flash-lite can do the job, this solves basically all latency issues for agentic workflows.
I publish my benchmarks here in case anyone is interested:
For the last 2 years, startup wisdom has been that models will continue to get cheaper and better. Claude first, and now Gemini has shown that it's not the case.
We priced an enterprise contract using Flash 1.5 pricing last summer, and today that contract would be unit economic negative if we used Flash 3. Flash 2.5 and now Flash 3.1 Lite barely breaks even.
I predict open-source models and fine-tuning are going to make a real comeback this year for economic reasons.
Lots of comments about the price change, but Artifical Analysis reports that 3.1 Flash-Lite (reasoning) used fewer than half of the tokens of 2.5 Flash-Lite (reasoning).
This will likely bring the cost below 2.5 flash-lite for many tasks (depends on the ratio of input to output tokens).
That said, AA also reports that 3.1 FL was 20% more expensive to run for their complete Intelligence index benchmark.
The overall point is that cost is extremely task-dependent, and it doesn’t work to just measure token cost because reasoning can burn so many tokens, reasoning token usage varies by both task and model, and similarly the input/output ratios vary by task.
Are there good open models out there that beat gemini 2.5 flash on price? I often run data extraction queries ("here is this article, tell me xyz") with structured output (pydantic) and wasn't aware of any feasible (= supports pydantic) cheap enough soln :/
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 31.3 ms ] threadI was just wishing they would make a new flash-lite model, these things are so fast. Unfortunately 2.5-flash and therefore 2.5-flash-lite failed some of my agentic workflows.
If 3.1-flash-lite can do the job, this solves basically all latency issues for agentic workflows.
I publish my benchmarks here in case anyone is interested:
https://upmaru.com/llm-tests/simple-tama-agentic-workflow-q1...
P.S: The pricing bump is quiet significant, but still stomachable if it performs well. It is significant though.
We priced an enterprise contract using Flash 1.5 pricing last summer, and today that contract would be unit economic negative if we used Flash 3. Flash 2.5 and now Flash 3.1 Lite barely breaks even.
I predict open-source models and fine-tuning are going to make a real comeback this year for economic reasons.
We benchmarked it for real-life voice-to-text use cases:
Key takeaways:- 1.8x faster than Gemini 3 Flash on average
- ~1.4 sec transcription time for short to medium recordings
- ~$0.50/mo for heavy users (10h+ transcription)
- Close to SOTA audio understanding and formatting instruction following
- Multilingual: one model, 100+ languages
Gemini is slowly making $15/month voice apps obsolete.
This will likely bring the cost below 2.5 flash-lite for many tasks (depends on the ratio of input to output tokens).
That said, AA also reports that 3.1 FL was 20% more expensive to run for their complete Intelligence index benchmark.
The overall point is that cost is extremely task-dependent, and it doesn’t work to just measure token cost because reasoning can burn so many tokens, reasoning token usage varies by both task and model, and similarly the input/output ratios vary by task.
I'm gonna switch some workflows to qwen3.5.
There's a lot of tasks that benefit from just having a mildly capable LLM and 2.5 Flash Lite worked out of the box for cheap.
Can we get flash lite lite please?
Edit: Logan said: "I think open source models like Gemma might be the answer here"
Implying that they're not interested in serving lower end Gemini models?