Personally, I've been using the free plan quite a lot and never hit a rate limit, but noticed the quality dropping. Pro was almost never available. Perhaps they aren't able to deliver a good quality Flash model to free users.
Did we forget what Flash was meant for? I have tried Flash-lite, in my tests, almost all the recent models we have today are good and enough for most daily tasks.
Flash-lite is one of the few models available that is easy to notice its flaws. Its good to summarize data (for example search results), that’s it.
Flash-Lite is closer to what Flash originally was, both in terms of the pricing and the intelligence level compared to other models in the same generation.
I had some fond time using Flash, asking "what's what" questions against objects I found in nature etc. The answers I got were fine, so it was benefiting to use, but I don't think I'll pay for that, it's still not "assistant" level helpful.
OpenAI cancelling the $200/20x and then introducing the $500/25x was basically the canary in the coal mine.
I am looking forward to the 2026 numbers from Anthropic in preperation for their IPO, because that's where the really big numbers are going to be.
I've always hated "free" because it sucks the oxygen away from good ideas and redirects money to people who have the connections to get zero risk loans (with no responsibility to pay the principal if things go bad).
Over the past ~20 years we have benefited from VCs valuing growth and distant payoffs, in part because discount rates were low. Now investors have a preference for nearer term profitability (higher discount rates), thus prices are increasing.
If the free stuff is subsidised by ads: noo advertisements are bad!!
What should be illegal is to try to get customers by letting it use for free or at a low price and the jack up prices
Also this is the Flash-Lite model, which they specifically don't want you to pay for.
I mean, sure you can blame Google Maps, but it wasn't my choice to consult Google Maps.
I think noticeable here is how hard it is to steer this trash model even when fed already correct information.
I asked "why closed?" and it corrected me to "it's open" with wrong information. Then it got the current time wrong.
Okay but isn't that obvious that's what would happen? Like even if you ask a human, that's where they will consult and if it shows its open, it doesn't really have any incentive to question the validity of the data.
But more so, it is on the management of the place as well that they have a Google My Business Page but do not update it. If they say its open, why would Google Maps mark it as closed? If it's marked as open on Google Maps, why would Gemini Flash Lite refute that?
Blaming the LLM for this makes little sense imo. Sure it's a dumb model but in this case, it was set up to lose.
1. Open on Google Maps?
2. Validate no extra notices posted on their public website
Even the fact that there is are special notices sometimes posted on their public website is something a model could have been trained to understand, same as a human being.
I hate how the Gemini series only responds to outright insult. Same with the Claudes. What is the point of antagonizing the user when he or she offers input. Is it so hard to spend a few "reasoning" tokens to reconcile contradicting evidences. Seems almost like the wrong epistemic posture is altogether imprinted during training. Or undone during alignment, "hardening", whatever. What a time to live in, having to argue with weights.
gemini.google.com/app runs a mixture of 3.1 and 3.6 while 3.8 is in aistudio
Really would have thought there is an incentive to move everything to one model generation to get scaling efficiency
There might be a connection
Because model providers have no moat, and the price of inference is quite large compared to just search, providing it for free makes no sense.
Right now, the goal of the free chatgpt and claude tiers is to accustom more people to AI, to create a new market, not to capture customers.
This strategy makes sense for start-ups with a lot of funding, but not for companies that need to be profitable. Apart from google, no large company is providing free inference to their large models in a consumer app (apart from meta maybe).
That's how much advertisers pay, on average, per user, and therefore how much you pay extra per month for things. Because otherwise the advertisers wouldn't have the money to buy this.
this means even on my tablet I'm gonna be stuck turning my smart lights on and off with Gemini flash lite. So many times when I've run out of COMPUTE, it's reduced itself to flash lite And it would just spit out nonsense BS saying that it can't turn the lights on or off, or it can't set calendar events, when I know for a fact that it can. I'm really looking forward to having to fight to get my bedroom lights to turn on every night now.
But then Google changed the default voice assistant on Android to use Gemini. So instead of relying on hard-coded "if the user says this exact phrase, do the thing we said would happen" conditions, people now have to hope the model's smart enough to figure what "turn on my lights" means from first principles every single time.
Alexa is also still very specific though. You can say “turn on bedroom” if the lights are named such, but “turn on the bedroom [lights]” will fail. I’ve always found that frustrating, but it does have the advantage that it’s very reliable if you use the right phrasing.
there are far more important aspects of star trek we should be obsessing over before being able to say “computer, wipe my ass.”
Her and the Apple Lady talk quite a lot. It's really useful, and we barely use the phone anymore (light switch is even rarer).
Kind of weird to me you'd want to talk or type to turn lights off instead of just having a widget button
Flash-lite is pretty capable and getting that entirely for free is not a bad deal at all.
It was always obvious Google couldn't keep letting non-paying users use Flash and Pro.
I'm not a fan of how they bundled their plans but they're not too bad especially when shared with a family. I think I've got almost 1TB of Google Photos at this point.
This is a much better page than TFA: https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/17004136
I pay Google $5/month for Chat and my wife gets to share that: a fantastic deal. I even get a short weekly (one each) opus and gemini vibe coding sessions with agy.
I pay for inference: I paid $3300 for a Mac mini 64G M5-Pro which runs Qwen-3.8-Flash-Next (3 bit quant) with pi-dev and the results are so very much excellent enough for about 60% of my work and paying Deepseek for deepseek-4.1-flash with Deepseek Harness handles almost everything else.
I worked at Google in 2013 and I mostly like them as a company. I like their approach to AI in general, but I hate the business models of Anthropic and OpenAI and I fear the US taxpayer is going to pick up the tab on this one.
I also have two daily tasks for local events and things to do and also a tech summary of new tech news.
If Flash Lite is not useful to the average user, Google will become an also-ran.
Open AI already has the widespread (and now generic) term "ChatGPT" to refer to any and all LLMs (by the common public—when I use the term "LLM" I get blank stares).