No. Right now I'm upset that Google has removed (or at least is in the process of removing) the Gemini 2.0 flash model. We use it for some pretty basic functionality because it's cheap and fast and honestly good enough for what we use it for in that part of our app. We're being forced to "upgrade" to models that are at least 2.5 times as expensive, are slower and, while I'm sure they're better for complex tasks, don't do measurably better than 2.0 flash for what we need. Yay. We've stuck with the GCP/Gemini ecosystem up until now, but this is kind of forcing us to consider other LLM providers.

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toofy 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

this is one of the reasons im hearing more and more people are using open/locally hosted models. particularly so we dont have to waste time to entirely redo everything when inevitably a company decides to pull the rug out from under us and change or remove something integral to our flow, which over the years we've seen countless times, and seems to be getting more and more common.

products entirely disappearing or significantly changing will be more and more common in the llm arena as things move forward towards companies shutting down, bubbles deflating, brand priorities drastically reshifting, etc...

i think, we're at or at least close to a time to really put some thought into which pieces of your flow could be done entirely with an open/local model and be honest with ourselves on which pieces of our flow truly needs sota or closed models that may entirely disappear or change. in the long run, putting a little bit of thought into this now will save a lot of headache later.

	▲	thraxil 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yeah. Back when Gemma2 came out we benchmarked it and were looking at open models. For our use case though, while the tasks are pretty simple, we do need a pretty large context window and Gemini had a big lead there over the open models for quite a while. I'll probably be evaluating the current batch of open models in the near future though.
	▲	jimbokun 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What’s interesting about this is that for previous technologies you could define a standard and demonstrate compliance with interfaces and behavior. But with LLMs, how do you know switching from one to another won’t change some behavior your system was implicitly relying on?

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elbear 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In case you don't know, Gemini 2.5 flash is hosted on DeepInfra. They also have 1.5 flash but not 2.0 flash.

I have no affiliation with DeepInfra. I use them, because they host open-source models that are good.

	▲	thraxil 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks. Yeah, for now we're moving to 3.1 flash lite as that's the new cheapest at $.25/1M and is also still "good enough". 2.5 flash is more expensive at $.30/1M (looks like Deep Infra charges the same as GCP/VertexAI for it). I might check them out for Gemma though. We benchmarked Gemma2 when that came out and it wasn't remotely usable for us largely because the context window was way too small. It looks like 3 or 4 might be worth evaluating though.