• Google has introduced a new model within the Gemini family called 1.5 Flash.
• As the name suggests, it is a more efficient and faster version of the generative AI model.
• It is designed for high volume, high frequency tasks, such as summarisation, chat applications, image and video captioning.

Google I/O 2024 kicked off this evening with a flurry of announcements related to the big tech firm’s AI plans, as many expected. One of the key announcements outlined during the opening presentations were additions to the Gemini family of AI models, which include 1.5 Flash.

As the name would suggest, this new model is a speed and efficiency focused offering.

“It’s optimized for high-volume, high-frequency tasks at scale, is more cost-efficient to serve and features our breakthrough long context window. While it’s a lighter weight model than 1.5 Pro, it’s highly capable of multimodal reasoning across vast amounts of information and delivers impressive quality for its size,” describes Google of Gemini 1.5 Flash.

To that end, the company explains that 1.5 Flash excels at a number of tasks thanks to the fact that it has “distilled” the essential knowledge and skills from a larger model like Gemini 1.5 Pro and put it into a smaller model.

In particular it can be used for, “summarization, chat applications, image and video captioning, data extraction from long documents and tables, and more.”

As for availability, Gemini Flash is expected to roll out to more than 200 regions in June, including South Africa, although precise pricing for access to the model is yet to be confirmed.

Google also noted that both 1.5 Pro and 1.5 Flash will be available in public preview with a 1 million token context window in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI.