Please don't discontinue Gemini 2.5 Flash

https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/please-dont-discontinue-gemini-2-5-flash/174246

by NickDob • 13 days ago

135 86 13 days ago

discuss.ai.google.dev

It's such a good model for the price, for a lot of tasks it outperforms gpt5 at 3x the speed and 1/5 the price. The price jump from 2.5->3->3.5 has been so high.

llmslave2• 13 days ago

i have found google models outperforming other models in actual agentic workflows

mips_avatar3• 13 days ago

I find that Gemini flash 2.5 performs about as well as Claude sonnet for non coding agentic flows except it’s actually fast enough

lostmsu• 13 days ago

Can't run Qwen 3.6 35B A3B? Even Qwen 3.5 9B is comparable.

phren0logy• 13 days ago

Is it really? A 9B model is equivalent? Honest question, as I haven't spent that much time with the 9B variant or Flash 2.5. But that seems like a pretty bold claim for such a small model. I assumed Flash 2.5 was considerably larger, but maybe I'm wrong?

ricardobeat• 13 days ago

Pretty much. It even beats it in a few benchmarks: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/comparisons/qwen3-5-9b-...

Qwen 3.6 and Gemma 4 small models are in a league of their own.

kilroy123• 13 days ago

UGH why are they killing this model? This is one of the best models you can use in an API for a large swath of tasks. It's kind of the perfect trifecta of fast, cheap, and smart enough.

Why does Google constantly kill off good things?

cyanydeez• 13 days ago

because they keep these models loaded, and they can't just arbitrarily load up whatever models you want.

but it's more likely just a business case: they need you buying higher tier model output. They know whose doing what, so someone needs their 3Q bonus.

Wowfunhappy• 13 days ago

I was going to reply that Anthropic, which supposedly is the most capacity constrained of the leading AI labs, still provides access to models as old as Opus 3.

But then I realized Opus 3 is an outlier, and Anthropic has removed access to relatively more recent models. https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/model-depre...

I wonder what the deal is with Opus 3.

duskdozer• 12 days ago

Somewhere along the line, killing the model or the "good things" is anticipated to make them more money than not doing so.

Hamuko• 13 days ago

Isn't asking Google to not discontinue a product a bit like asking the tide to not rise?

trvz• 13 days ago

That, and while you’ve chained yourself to the floor of the littoral zone previously.

wseqyrku• 13 days ago

And worse, they didn't say please.

segmondy• 13 days ago

This is the problem with cloud models, you build a "predictable" workflow then they remove it with a new and improved one that is less deterministic and often costs more. If you use a local model discontinuation is no longer a thing to worry about.

tiew9Vii• 13 days ago

This is a huge (obvious) risk I've seen very little talk/concern on.

It's not even the new one being "less deterministic and often costs more".

Application prompts overfit the model they are using to get the output they want. Switch model, the prompt no longer produces the output you expect and you may not be able to get the output you need anymore.

If a model is critical for your application/business you want the ability to run it yourself otherwise you are stuck when it becomes unavailable.

sidpatil• 12 days ago

Further, they may change the behavior of the existing model without providing clear notice. E.g. existing models start to behave worse shortly after new model releases, due to resource reallocation away from the older models toward the newly-released ones.

jazzyjackson• 12 days ago

You can run software you control in the cloud, so the cloud/local distinction isn’t really the problem/solution. Relying on proprietary models that can be discontinued is a problem, using an open weights model that can’t be taken away is a solution, whether or not those weights fit on a MacBook.

Ferret7446• 11 days ago

That's the point, if you're using the weaker models, you should shift to a local model (it doesn't make sense for Google to keep providing it). SaaS is best for the SOTA models.

hrpnk2• 13 days ago

I love how there is a "Please do not discontinue gemini-2.0-flash[-lite], 2.5 is NOT an equivalent" from Feb 20th. Getting too attached to models is a smell.

all2• 13 days ago

That's like saying 'getting attached to locked dependencies for your app is a smell'.

But this could be framed as 'getting attached to an API revision when a new one is available'...

I can see it both ways, tbh.

quentindanjou• 13 days ago

In the post the issue is performance. Are you saying that getting too attached to performance is a smell? That sounds very odd.

It's not because a model performs better in some applications (often by fine-tuning to get better scores at specific tests) that it is better across the board or that we have to believe the company releasing the model with a high number 3 > 2 so that it is commonly accepted as better.

Pushing the reasonnning further: f you need an Opus level performance then not accepting GPT 3 isn't a smell.

hrpnk2• 13 days ago

The smell is about folks being attached to the same model because they're used to it. Just like any UI change in an app that one uses everyday is annoying.

What's often missing is the actual engineering. If you have evals for your use case, you use these to adjust to the new model. DSPy has great prompt engineering constructs it ships with.

The smell is all about vibing, where a model feels better because the structure of the answers is more familiar to a person, instead of engineering where given constraints and input/outputs one is using/bending the system to fulfil the requirements.

data-ottawa• 13 days ago

I built some BigQuery workflows on 2.0 and 2.5 flash lite that are something like 6x more expensive with 3.1 flash lite.

I tried 3 flash for months and it didn’t work using Googles own vertexai integration because it’s been in preview mode for months.

Not wanting to pay significantly more and do a bunch of rework isn’t a smell.

They left a large gap in their new pricing vs the prior generation, and if you had a working use case that sucks. The model is >99% reliable for my use case so there’s nothing to gain from a smarter model.

samuelknight2• 13 days ago

It's not a smell. Why should these developers rebuild a core piece of their stack every few months. Switching out a model requires a new round of testing and validation when we should be able to rely on a piece of software the behave the same way since the last time we touched it.

vjsrinivas• 13 days ago

Its almost a given considering how fast this field moves. Also, what kind of workflow structure would someone have that a single specific model is the only one that would perform acceptably?

askvictor• 13 days ago

It's kind of the same problem with cloud in general (though that moves much slower).

If you want to be sure to be in control, then host it yourself

imhoguy2• 13 days ago

This is how development looks like for many years now, constant rewrite on the horizon. I think LLM development hype surpassed Blockchain and JS frameworks craze of decade ago.

recursive5• 13 days ago

Why should these developers rebuild a core piece of their stack every few months?

That's what they signed up for when established a hard dependency on an subscription online-only LLM model.

palmotea• 13 days ago

Why should these developers rebuild a core piece of their stack every few months. Switching out a model requires a new round of testing and validation when we should be able to rely on a piece of software the behave the same way since the last time we touched it.

Because fuck you, that's way. /s

There's a massive amount of contempt from a lot of software businesses for their customers, and it's just getting worse with LLM models.

Capricorn2481• 13 days ago

These are AI models designed to be non deterministic. If upgrading from GPT 5.5 > 5.6 breaks your entire workflow, you shouldn't be using AI to begin with

dacox• 13 days ago

the 1.5 and 2.0 flash models were absolute beasts. They were very cheap, and _very_ fast. We contemplated moving some of our fine tuned workloads to them because we would have gotten very substantial total latency reductions for our workloads.

However, they are aggressively deprecating them (OpenAI is as well), and replacing with newer models. These newer models are all reasoning models, and importantly, only bear the flash name. They are not fast. And they are very expensive!

bjord4• 13 days ago

have you experimented at all with the deepseek flash models?

imhoguy2• 13 days ago

I test workloads with multiple closed and at least one open model now. Good to have a backup on 503s or credits run out.

ekidd• 13 days ago

We have benchmarks for our use cases, and every generation after Gemini 2.0 Flash has been a grim hit on price/performance. Costs have gone up, throughput has gone down, and performance has improved very slightly (and regressed on a few things).

leumon• 13 days ago

If they don't want to host it maybe they could open source it. This would probably be a win-win situation.

gonzalohm• 13 days ago

How is that a win for them?

ioreader• 13 days ago

Yes, Gemini 2.5 Flash is well balanced model that meets sweet spot of price vs performance trade-off which is good enough for non-reasoning tasks and offer at competitive price.

_doctor_love• 13 days ago

Agree with the observation others have made. The only true solve if a specific model version is critical to your application or workflow, you need to host the model yourself so you have control over it. You don't want to be stuck getting rug-pulled by a model provider.

And as another commenter pointed out - in particular for Google of all companies - expect that the rug pull can and will happen. They're not known for keep anything around for very long.

avaer• 13 days ago

Why not a "stop killing AI" movement?

If a company deploys a paid AI model and makes people depend on it, they need to dump the weights at EOL.

wat10000• 13 days ago

There are plenty of open weights models available already. If the ability to keep running the same model is important to you, then choose one of those.

derektank2• 13 days ago

Presumably, a “Stop Killing AI” movement, mirroring the Stop Killing Games movement, would require a provider that revokes access a previously available model to make it open weights at the time of death.

Arainach2• 13 days ago

Where do people get ideas like this? In what world does this make sense?

You have several choices:

1. Work with a supplier and sign a contract guaranteeing support for whatever period of time you want at a mutually agreeable price

2. Host your own stack to depend on and support it for however long you want

3. Accept that you're paying for a service and that it can go away at any time.

Companies aren't obligated to support things forever and they aren't obligated to open them up when they no longer feel it's worth supporting them. Claiming they should is absurd.

kennywinker• 13 days ago

I mean, claiming the have a moral imperative to do it might be a bit of a stretch, but it sure would be nice - can’t blame people for wanting things.

svachalek2• 13 days ago

It's not a legal obligation, no, but neither should you as a customer accept a vendor that treats you like that.

derektank2• 13 days ago

they aren't obligated to open them up when they no longer feel it's worth supporting them.

Creating a legal obligation to release the weights of discontinued models doesn’t seem absurd. These models are built on existing publicly available information; a requirement that it be returned to the commons once it is no longer in commercial use hardly seems like a substantial regulatory burden.

recursive5• 13 days ago

If you paid a one-time fee for an offline model, and then you were revoked access to it, that would apply.

If you are paying an ongoing subscription for a service, I'd advise you not to rely on it too much or keep a list of alternatives.

swe_dima2• 13 days ago

the writing is on the wall for it, I have switched to gemma-4-26b-a4b.

At least in benchmarks, it scores higher and is faster.

3stacks• 12 days ago

How does it compare cost-wise for you?

swe_dima2• 12 days ago

About the same, using cloudflare. For some very bizarre reason Vertex has a very low non-adjustable quota.

GaggiX• 13 days ago

I really like Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite because it's a dirt cheap model that support every input modalities.

At least now MiMo v2.5 exists and can be used as another dirt cheap multimodal model.

tylertreat• 13 days ago

I am more concerned about the cost step up from Gemini 2.5 Flash to 3.5 Flash, with the latter being roughly 3x more expensive. I thought the intention of the Flash models was to be relatively low-latency and more affordable compared to Pro, but the newer Flash models aren’t being priced as such. Then again, the era of cheap and plentiful AI might be coming to an end…

svachalek2• 13 days ago

Yeah IIRC the latest Pro is $12 and Flash is $9 which is not the usual 2X-3X multiplier we see separate model grades. It also puts Flash now about 2X GLM 5.2, which is a highly capable open weight model.

captainbland• 13 days ago

I think the thing is that 3.5 flash is actually similarly capable on a lot of tasks that matter and is faster. Pro is more specialised in the direction of mathematical reasoning and stuff.

zzleeper• 13 days ago

gemini 2 and 2.5 were great models for quick-and-dirty OCR

It was fine to lose 2, but 2.5 will be dearly missed as it hit the sweet spot in terms of cost-performance :/

Alifatisk• 13 days ago

So you’re telling me, these people have workflows thats so tightly integrated to gemini-2.5-flash that no other model matches it’s performance? Really?

Have they really looked at all alternatives and found none to be a viable option?

I might have underestimated how good 2.5-flash was. I understand the issue with pricing though.

This is why I believe, for a company, to never be reliant on closed-weight models.

rvz• 13 days ago

"Do not get rid of GPT 4o"

alansaber• 13 days ago

clearly benchmark and optimise for a specific model over millions of datapoints > new model comes out > get to do it all over again. At this point just become Cursor and get paid for it.

low_tech_punk• 13 days ago

Interestingly, I found the original nano banana also has the best latency/quality trade-off that new versions can't beat. This might be domain/prompt specific though. I wonder if there is some truth in the saying that something is either new or improved by never "new and improved".

yieldcrv• 13 days ago

There will be such a massive shift to Qwen VL when Google shoots itself in the foot retiring Gemini 2.5 Flash just because a $1 million/yr L7 wanted to show initiative to become a $1.2 million/yr L8

whycombinetor• 13 days ago

I feel this way about gpt-5-nano (EOL December 2026). It seems like the open weight models have progressed a long way since these old models were released though. Deepseek V4 Flash is even cheaper than gpt-5-nano. I'm still going to pay a cloud provider to run it for me, I'm not local inference pilled yet, but I _can_ run it myself in the future if worse comes to worst.

Objectively testable evals are one thing, but how does one judge whether a new model is adequately reproducing the subjective "writing style" of an old model that you've gotten accustomed to the feel of?

ryukoposting• 13 days ago

I feel the same way about qwen-2.5-coder. Work yanked it from our internally-availbale models one day, breaking a couple tools that depended on it heavily. I haven't found another model that performs as well for the specific tasks I was doing with it. Like yeah, I could throw some gargantuan model at it but then it would take eons to get the same result that used to take 3 seconds.

I've settled on deepseek-v4-flash as a replacement. Results are just as good, but it's slower.

throw_m239339• 13 days ago

"Don't discontinue Google RSS reader!"

How about you stop relying on Google products? You've learned nothing after all these years?

zuzululu• 13 days ago

sucks we use 2.5 flash/lite in our company it handles millions of requests a day

theres nothing in its price range that provides the same all around perf

as noted, gemini 3 flash is expensive

really not liking google these days they are not hungry anymore

verdverm4• 13 days ago

They appear to be trying lock-in, or some sort of way to make Gemini family the only logical choice on their cloud. They don't offer the most desired open weight models per-token, so we found another vendor and are less likely to use Google services going forward (for more reasons than this)

kaueg• 13 days ago

Maybe there's also a security aspect to this, older models are probably worse against prompt injection, etc.

exabrial2• 13 days ago

I don't know how many times people will need to learn this: Do not use Google in Production.

bjord4• 13 days ago

in this case, the other frontier shops are all doing the same thing, so maybe the advice here should be "don't use closed weight models in production"?

exabrial2• 13 days ago

Google has a history of pulling the rug on their paying customers and offering 0 support when it is convenient for them. You have no recourse. There are a billion cloud providers to choose from, this is not the first time this has been on the first page of HN.

recursive5• 13 days ago

It ain't just google.

bjord4• 13 days ago

there was a community of people who used (famously sycophantic) gpt 4o as—for lack of a better word—a friend, who were devastated when it was shut down

I suppose at least in this case the loss is not an emotional one?

Scroll_Swe• 13 days ago

Yes, these people did not like 4o going away.

This is one of the most dystopian subreddits:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/

uproarchat• 13 days ago

I wonder if some day we might see Archive.org organizations preserving older models as operating costs go down

kbelder• 13 days ago

I was thinking that somebody (Me? No... Somebody.) should start a foundation to start making archive copies of models... not for usage, but because every model is a (somewhat flawed) snapshot of the state of global knowledge as of the time it was trained. In fifty years, you'll be able to talk to Gemini 2.5 flash and get answers from the perspective of 2025. It might be a valuable for historic and sociological research.

Please don't discontinue Gemini 2.5 Flash

Related Stories