Google has announced a big expansion of its Gemini AI model family today. After months of tweaking and tuning, the high-power Gemini 2.5 Pro is leaving preview and is ready for developers to build on. Meanwhile, Google is offering a peek at its upcoming high-efficiency model, known as Gemini 2.5 Pro Flash-Lite. Try as it might, Google can’t get away from confusing model names.
Google’s AI aspirations have been looking up in 2025 with the debut of Gemini 2.5. These models showed a marked improvement over past versions, making Google more competitive with OpenAI and its popular GPT models. However, we’ve been inundated with previews and test builds as Google works toward general availability, which means a model is stable enough for long-term development work.
The 2.5 Flash model left preview at I/O, but Gemini 2.5 Pro lagged behind. Today, Flash is hitting general availability with the 04-17 build. Gemini 2.5 Pro is leaving preview and also reaching general availability, and as predicted, the recently revamped 06-05 build is the winner. This version aimed to address some issues that popped up in the Google I/O build of 2.5 Pro, and it appears to have worked.
Google now has a Gemini model for every task.
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All Gemini 2.5 models include adjustable thinking budgets, making them appealing to developers who want more control over costs. For the most price-sensitive devs, Google is also introducing Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite, which was previously experimental. This model is now in preview, offering a way to run high-volume AI workloads without incurring significant costs. Compared to 2.5 Flash, it’s one-third of the cost for text, image, and video inputs and less than one-sixth of the cost for output tokens. It’s unlikely this variant of Gemini will come to the app for regular users, because it’s less capable than 2.5 Flash and only makes sense when you’re paying by the token.
