Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B is now production ready (via) Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B is "a smaller and faster variant of 1.5 Flash" - and is now released to production, at half the price of the 1.5 Flash model.

It's really, really cheap:

  • $0.0375 per 1 million input tokens on prompts <128K
  • $0.15 per 1 million output tokens on prompts <128K
  • $0.01 per 1 million input tokens on cached prompts <128K

Prices are doubled for prompts longer than 128K.

I believe images are still charged at a flat rate of 258 tokens, which I think means a single non-cached image with Flash should cost 0.00097 cents - a number so tiny I'm doubting if I got the calculation right.

OpenAI's cheapest model remains GPT-4o mini, at $0.15/1M input - though that drops to half of that for reused prompt prefixes thanks to their new prompt caching feature (or by half if you use batches, though those can’t be combined with OpenAI prompt caching. Gemini also offer half-off for batched requests).

Anthropic's cheapest model is still Claude 3 Haiku at $0.25/M, though that drops to $0.03/M for cached tokens (if you configure them correctly).

I've released llm-gemini 0.2 with support for the new model:

llm install -U llm-gemini
llm keys set gemini
# Paste API key here
llm -m gemini-1.5-flash-8b-latest "say hi"