Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hobofan 3 days ago
> you may not want your org to be held hostage by OpenAI / Anthropic

Or Google. I'm working with multiple customers right now that are very pissed at Google for deprecating Gemini 2.5 Flash, canning the GA release of 3.0 Flash and now have to decide whether to bite the bullet of the 5x price increase for 3.5 Flash or switching providers. Quite a few of them will likely fully pivot to open models.
1 comments
bachmeier 3 days ago
I'd be curious if any of your customers have tried 3.1 Flash Lite. It's cheaper than 2.5 Flash, and in my experience with the free tier, quite an upgrade in terms of quality of response. My suspicion is that Google is killing off the old models because they aren't a good value for the customer or for themselves.
link
hobofan 2 days ago
Most of them are using it for data extraction use-cases on complex where they are already in a tricky cost vs. quality compromise. Some of them have evaluated 3.1 Flash Lite but for all of them it performed worse than 2.5 Flash and below requirement.

The only ones I've seen switch to 3.1 Flash Lite were from 2.5 Flash Lite, and all for the most simple use cases, e.g. small UX enhancements.

link