Does Google believe people want fast models because they have some sort of evidence of that preference? Or are they no longer capable of delivering a Pro model?

I have read that "pro"/"opus"/etc models can actually be worse for everyday coding as they reason "too deeply" and turn over too many stones over-thinking the problem and potentially getting distracted.

This feels absurd to me (my gut is "I want the SMARTEST model I can get!!"), but often I find that my experience of using a flash/sonnet model for every-day workhorse coding they are better.

Its not the same thing, but when I think of that I am reminded of working with some engineers in the past who are incredibly smart and have PhDs (or to put it another way, over-qualified) and they were crap engineers because they'd just not be able to focus on the task and ONLY the task at hand and would get easily distracted by the "why" or "more interesting" things when I just asked them to fix a simple bug or whatever. Again, its not the same thing at all, but it certainly comes to mind when I think of this or experience a pro/opus model suggesting we make huge refactors when a tactical fix is all that is required etc.

Of course, the opus-sized models are great when it comes to huge comprehension/research/debugging efforts where the deeper reasoning is actually useful.

Probably both. Having a strong frontier model is necessary not just for the model itself but because it provides a halo effect for your entire line. So if Google could deliver a pro model they would. But I also think Google is targeting the wider market and not picking verticals like Anthropic does. A good enough model is good enough for most generalist tasks, and being fast and cheap is more important to less sophisticated users. Also can't forget Google is at every level of the AI vertical. They're not losing sleep because they're not competitive at the one level in which open weight models come out with the quickness. It reflects poorly on them, and from a marketing perspective its not good but in some ways its actually the least valuable place to be.

If you think about Google and their business/reach, fast and light models suite them the best.

Google probably crunches more tokens daily than the other labs combined, just because basically the entire global population uses Google (sans china) and Google has shoved Gemini into everything.

All the leaks say their latest attempt at a Pro model was not competitive.