Google has launched Gemini 1.5 Flash, a lightweight yet highly capable sibling to Gemini 1.5 Pro, optimized for low latency and high throughput AI tasks. Built on the same architecture as 1.5 Pro, Flash supports multimodal inputs (text, image, audio, video) and handles up to 1 million tokens of context. It’s designed for use cases like rapid summarization, real-time Q&A, and code generation where speed is critical. Now available via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI, Flash also introduces developer-centric features like context caching and function calling for efficient integration into production workflows. It allows developers to set a thinking budget for fine-grained control over the maximum number of tokens a model can generate while thinking. A higher budget allows the model to reason further for improved quality.