It’s clear that affordable access to AI has been possible for a long time, which explains why the U.S. restricts its adversaries from accessing AI technology.


Google introduces new class of cheap AI models as cost concerns intensify

SAN FRANCISCO (Feb 5): Alphabet's Google on Wednesday announced updates to its Gemini family of large language models, including a new product line with competitive pricing to low-cost artificial intelligence models like that of Chinese rival DeepSeek.

The tech giant offers several versions of Gemini that vary in price and performance. It already offered a lightweight variant known as "Flash" but its new "Flash-Lite" model is even cheaper.

On Wednesday, Google released Gemini 2.0 Flash to the general public after previewing it to developers in December. It also launched Flash-Lite and released a new version of its flagship "Pro" model into test phases.

Google created Flash-Lite after receiving positive feedback about the 1.5 version of Flash, Koray Kavukcuoglu, chief technology officer of Google's DeepMind AI lab, said in a press release. Gemini 2.0 Flash is costlier than its predecessor.

The cost to develop AI models and, in turn, the cost to use them have come under investor scrutiny in recent weeks after DeepSeek revealed it spent less than US$6 million on the final training run of a model. Developers at leading US AI firms said the total cost was likely magnitudes larger.

Still, DeepSeek's rise drew questions on the earnings calls of Alphabet and rivals Microsoft and Meta. All have so far signaled intent to continue massive capital expenditures in the field.

Alphabet shares slumped Tuesday in part due to investor pessimism around a planned capex hike that was 29% higher than Wall Street expected.

Certain inputs on Gemini Flash-Lite cost US$0.019 per 1 million tokens, a term for the units of data processed by an AI model. That compares to US$0.075 on the cost-efficient version of OpenAI's flagship model and US$0.014 on DeepSeek's cheap model, though DeepSeek states on its website that the pricing will increase fivefold on Feb 8.

Great move by the DeepSeek bunch to disrupt the market.

Not free meh? I thought if you have Android you can just use it anytime?

fleshlight oh wai

Free to collect data from you ..

Paid to offer you more advance information

Also the US fools the world saying it is expensive to build AI ecosystem

This post has been edited by NoNameSoldier: Feb 6 2025, 09:58 AM

i thought deepseek is free? no matter how cheap people surely will grab the free one?

With ads coming soon.

Free if and only if you have the hardware to run. The small distilled models are not as good as other purpose built small models.

Free will have some limitations.

eg you can only do a certain number of chats in a certain time, after that you will need to pay or wait.

No problem mostly for personal use, but if you want to market an app which uses AI, you will very quickly hit those limits.

You may even hit those limits if you are a heavy user.

edit: https://ai.google.dev/pricing#2_0flash

This post has been edited by loserguy: Feb 6 2025, 10:14 AM

lol as though they don't have the data even if you pay, the TnC says it won't be used to train their models. Doesn't say anything about ads

They are only making it free to bait you into getting used to using it.. later it's gonna be a monthly subscription service like what all corporates are aiming for right now.. they are slowly transitioning all of us into owning nothing.. later you don't even buy cars, you're renting

It also did not specific free AI will be free for you life long

hope meta ai will have some good breakthrough, because open source