It's official: Gemini Flash and Pro are now available within Fivetran Activations AI columns! But with more models comes more decisions about which is right for a given use case.
Here's our breakdown of how much Gemini costs, how it performs, and the use cases it's a fit for.
Costs: How does Gemini pricing compare to Claude and GPT?
Before we get into performance, let's take a moment to understand costs. Most LLMs charge by the token (generally about 4 characters) and charge for processing inputs (your prompt) and outputs (the response generated.)
Here's how Gemini compares to the other large-scale LLMs:
Breaking down costs
Gemini is the sole model here that changes its pricing based on the length of the prompt. 100k tokens equates to roughly 80,000 words, according to Google's shared estimates (this isn't perfect - a token equates to roughly 4 characters including spaces and punctuation. )
Which means that the 128k threshold gets you just about 100k words. For context, that's about the length of a short novel.
For simple instructions, this is unlikely to be an issue. But for complex prompts that involve ingesting a lot of data, large json files, or reviewing long blocks of writing, you're likely to run up against these higher cost tiers.
Gemini Flash vs Pro
Like most of the other LLM providers, Google offers different models tuned for different needs. Here's where the models stand right now:
- Flash is Google's lightweight model optimized for speed. It has a context window of 1 million tokens.
- Pro is the heavyweight model optimized for performance, with a context window of 2 million tokens.
The context window is a measure of how long of a conversation the LLM can carry out before it's unable to consider all of the information shared. Here's a quick primer if you'd like to dig deeper.
Benchmark Performance for Gemini Models vs GPT and Claude
Let's talk numbers. To understand the use cases where Gemini will shine, we compared it to GPT and Claude across a series of leading LLM benchmarks:
We'll dig into what this means, but if you'd like to understand these benchmarks better, here's a quick overview of LLM benchmarks and what each one is testing for.
Breaking down performance
The bottom line is that all of these models are highly performant. The Gemini models consistently perform close to par for their GPT counterparts for most applications across coding, general knowledge and math. However, Claude still out-performs the other models in most areas.
Gemini Flash really shines in cost-for-performance. Even cheaper than GPT 4o mini, this model is a workhorse that can really shine in small-scale applications.
So which model should I choose?
This is a complicated question. But based on our testing, we've found some key learnings:
- Lightweight models like Flash and mini are excellent for internal applications: We use mini for our fit score calculations, churn prevention and other prompts that involve processing a json and writing a summary output.
- More complex models are our pick for more complex or more "human" tasks: We love smarter models like Haiku, Gemini Pro and GPT 4o for things like sentiment analysis and performance with more complex analysis tasks like PLG playbooks.
- We love the most performant models for externally-facing tasks: There's no doubt that Sonnet is an incredible model. But it comes at a hefty cost. We like to reserve this model for customer-facing tasks like writing personalized outbounds.
