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Liwink | 5 months ago

Gemini 2.5 Flash is an impressive model for its price. However, I don't understand why Gemini 2.0 Flash is still popular.

From OpenRouter last week:

* xAI: Grok Code Fast 1: 1.15T

* Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4: 586B

* Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash: 325B

* Sonoma Sky Alpha: 227B

* Google: Gemini 2.0 Flash: 187B

* DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3.1 (free): 180B

* xAI: Grok 4 Fast (free): 158B

* OpenAI: GPT-4.1 Mini: 157B

* DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3 0324: 142B

discuss

simonw|5 months ago

My one big problem with OpenRouter is that, as far as I can tell, they don't provide any indication of how many companies are using each model.

For all I know there are a couple of enormous whales on there who, should they decide to switch from one model to another, will instantly impact those overall ratings.

I'd love to have a bit more transparency about volume so I can tell if that's what is happening or not.

minimaxir|5 months ago

Granted, due to OpenRouter's 5.5% surcharge, any enormous whales have a strong financial incentive to use the provider's API directly.

A "weekly active API Keys" faceted by models/app would be a useful data point to measure real-world popularity though.

frde_me|5 months ago

I know we have a lot of workloads at my company on older models no one has bothered to upgrade yet

koakuma-chan|5 months ago

Hell yeah, GPT 35 Turbo

tiahura|5 months ago

Primarily classification or something else?

mistic92|5 months ago

Price, 2.0 Flash is cheaper than 2.5 Flash but still very good model.

nextos|5 months ago

API usage of Flash 2.0 is free, at least till you hit a very generous bound. It's not simply a trial period. You don't even need to register any payment details to get an API key. This might be a reason for its popularity. AFAIK only some Mistral offerings have a similar free tier?

YetAnotherNick|5 months ago

Gemini 2.0 Flash is the best fast non reasoning model by quite a margin. Lot of things doesn't require any reasoning.

crazysim|5 months ago

Maybe the same reason why they kept the name for the 2.5 Flash update.

People are lazy at pointing to the latest name.

rohansood15|5 months ago

2.0 Flash is significantly cheaper than 2.5 Flash, and is/was better than 2.5-Flash-Lite before this latest update. It's a great workhorse model for basic text parsing/summary/image understanding etc. Though looks like 2.5-Flash-Lite will make it redundant.

koakuma-chan|5 months ago

Why is Grok so popular

minimaxir|5 months ago

Grok Code Fast 1 usage is driven almost entirely by Kilo Code and Cline: https://openrouter.ai/x-ai/grok-code-fast-1/apps

Both apps have offered usage for free for a limited time:

https://blog.kilocode.ai/p/grok-code-fast-get-this-frontier-...

https://cline.bot/blog/grok-code-fast

NitpickLawyer|5 months ago

It's pretty good and fast af. At backend stuff is ~ gpt5-mini in capabilities, writes ok code, and works good with agentic extensions like roo/kilo. My colleagues said it handles frontend creation so-so, but it's so fast that you can "roll" a couple of tries and choose the one you want.

Also cheap enough to not really matter.

coder543|5 months ago

I think it has been free in some editor plugins, which is probably a significant factor.

I would rather use a model that is good than a model that is free, but different people have different priorities.

BoredPositron|5 months ago

They had a lot of free promos with coding apps. It's okay and cheap so I bet some sticked with it.

davey48016|5 months ago

I think it's very cheap right now.

riku_iki|5 months ago

I think it is included for free into some coding product

keeeba|5 months ago

It came from nowhere to 1T tokens per week, seems… suspect.

Simon321|5 months ago

it was free

PetrBrzyBrzek|5 months ago

It’s cheaper and faster. What’s not to understand?

testycool|5 months ago

You can get it to be unhinged as well. It's awesome.