Gemini
The model behind AI Studio. Rarely used directly, I go through AI Studio for first iterations. Long contexts (1M tokens) and good multimodal.
Strengths
- Native multimodality, text, images, video, and audio in a single context
- Deep Google ecosystem integration, Docs, Gmail, Maps, Search in real time
- Flash variant optimized for real-time, low-latency production deployments
- Most cost-efficient frontier model API output pricing in 2026
Limitations
- Coding benchmark lags competitors at 63.8% SWE-bench (vs Claude 79.6%)
- Hallucinations and logical errors still present under complex reasoning
- Privacy concerns, Google data collection practices remain a friction point
Best for
- Apps requiring real-time web grounding and Google Workspace integration
- Video, audio, and image-heavy multimodal pipelines