On Tuesday, Google announced the general availability of its Gemini 2.5 family of artificial intelligence (AI) models. With this rollout, users can now utilize stable versions of both the Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash models. In a notable update, the Mountain View-based company has also made the Pro model accessible to users on the free tier of the Gemini platform. Furthermore, Google introduced the Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite, touted as its fastest and most cost-effective AI model to date.
Gemini 2.5 Pro Is Now Open to All Users
A blog post from Google detailed the release of the stable versions for the Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flash models, which had previously been available only in a preview mode. During the preview phase, users experienced limitations in capability, along with increased instances of errors and glitches that are expected to be resolved in the full versions.
While Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers will maintain access to the Gemini 2.5 Pro model, it will now also be available to free-tier users, albeit with a lower daily usage limit compared to paid subscribers. Google AI Pro users benefit from an allowance of 100 daily prompts, while Ultra users can access an even greater volume. Importantly, this latest Pro model is consistent with the version launched earlier this month, showing no significant updates.
The update means that the model selection menu on both the Gemini website and mobile app will no longer depict the preview versions, shifting to show users the Gemini 2.5 Flash, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and the Personalisation Preview model. The latter can utilize users’ Google Search histories to provide tailored responses.
Additionally, the Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite model has been launched, which Google claims outperforms the previous 2.0 Flash-Lite model, excelling in tasks such as coding, mathematics, science, reasoning, and multimodal operations. This low-latency model is designed for real-time applications like translation and classification, maintaining features from the 2.5 family, including flexible reasoning across different token budgets, integration with Google Search and code execution tools, support for multimodal inputs, and a context window reaching one million tokens.
The Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite model is currently accessible through Google AI Studio and Vertex AI, which are also hosting the newly stabilized versions of the 2.5 Pro and Flash models. Moreover, Google is actively working on integrating the 2.5 Flash-Lite and Flash models into its Search functionalities.
