What people seem to miss very hard is that they get interactive chat mode of all the models, including the best and newest (Gemini 2.5 Pro, 2.5 Flash, 2.5 Flash Lite and older) totally for free. I mean when working from chat at https://aistudio.google.com/ the entire 1M context window and all is totally free of charge. You really get a very good AI for nothing.
Funny you mention this, I literally just got done loading the context window of AI studio up for an hour doing some prototyping and then was frustrated when I couldn’t see where I was at from billing (knew it couldn’t be that much, but I still like to know).
I assumed because I’m on paid tiers it would still cost behind a certain usage amount, but I guess not.
cma · 16h ago
Can you opt out of them training on your data in that free tier?
So sonnet-4 is faster than gemini-2.5-flash at long context. That is surprising. Especially since Gemini runs on those fast TPUS.
curl-up · 18h ago
Note that (in the first test, the only one where output length is reported), Gemini Pro returned more than 3x the amount of text, at less than 2x the amount of time. From my experience with Gemini, that time was probably mainly spent on thinking, length of which is not reported here. So looking at pure TPS of output, Gemini is faster, but without clear info on the thinking time/length, it's impossible to judge.
jbellis · 18h ago
if they left them both on defaults, flash is thinking-by-default and sonnet 4 is no-thinking-by-default
bitpush · 18h ago
> Claude’s overall response was consistently around 500 words—Flash and Pro delivered 3,372 and 1,591 words by contrast.
It isnt clear from the article whether the time they quote is time-to-first-token or time to completion. If it is latter, then it makes sense why gemini* would take longer even with similar token throughput.
netdur · 14h ago
output tokens must be generated in order (autoregressive decoding), inputs don’t have that constraint, so prefill is parallel, with stronger kernels, KV-cache handling, and batching, Claude can outrun Gemini.
lugao · 18h ago
Anthropic also uses TPUs for inference.
irthomasthomas · 17h ago
Do they rent them from Google? Or are they a different brand?
ancientworldnow · 15h ago
Google provides them.
irthomasthomas · 4h ago
Ah cool I'll have to read up on that, I had thought that google was hoarding them.
IMO, a good contest between LLMs would be data compression. Each LLM is given the same pile of text, and then asked to create compact notes that fit into N pages of text. Then the original text is replaced with their notes and they need to answer a bunch of questions about the original text using the notes alone.
rafaelmn · 6h ago
Summarization ? I'm pretty sure there are benchmarks for this because people used summarization to build search indexes (at least a few years ago when I was working on this they did and there were benchmarks)
daft_pink · 18h ago
i’m really curious how well they perform with a long chat history. i find that gemini often gets confused when the context is long enough and starts responding to prior prompts, using the cli or it’s gem chat window.
XenophileJKO · 18h ago
From my experience. Gemini is REALLY bad about context blending. It can't keep track of what I said and what it said in a conversation under 200K tokens. It blends concepts and statements up, then refers to some fabricated hybrid fact or comment.
Gemini has done this in ways that I haven't seen in the recent or current generation models from OpenAI or Anthropic.
It really surprised me that Gemini performs so well in multi-turn benchmarks, given that tendency.
IanCal · 17h ago
I’ve not experimented with the recent models for this but older Gemini models were awful for this - they’d lie about what I’d said or what was in their system prompt even with short conversations.
koakuma-chan · 18h ago
I really doubt you can fit all Harry Potter books in 1M tokens.
PeterStuer · 18h ago
The series is 1,084,170 words. At let's say 1.4 tokens per word, this would not fit, but it is getting close.
magicalhippo · 15h ago
How do they do if you test[1] them for attention deficit disorder?
https://i.imgur.com/pgfRrZY.png
I assumed because I’m on paid tiers it would still cost behind a certain usage amount, but I guess not.
I’m using Claude Pro for daily driver and Gemini / ChatGPT free tiers.
Not on ai studio.
There is some information that you assume to have shared that we are not picking up on.
Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44878147 - Aug 2025 (160 comments)
It isnt clear from the article whether the time they quote is time-to-first-token or time to completion. If it is latter, then it makes sense why gemini* would take longer even with similar token throughput.
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/JlE5T
https://web.archive.org/web/20250812172455/https://every.to/...
Gemini has done this in ways that I haven't seen in the recent or current generation models from OpenAI or Anthropic.
It really surprised me that Gemini performs so well in multi-turn benchmarks, given that tendency.
[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0766092/quotes/?item=qt1440870
https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/models (context window is details under model variant section with + signs)
They were meant to crank 2.5 to 2 million at some point though, maybe waiting now till 3?
Using the GPT-4 tokenizer (cl100k_base) yields 349,371 tokens.
Recent Google and Anthropic models do not have local tokenizers and ridiculously make you call their APIs to do it, so no idea about those.
Just thought that was interesting.