Free Gemini users can finally chat in a flash

Google made several updates to the free version of its Gemini chatbot, including making its low-latency multimodal model Gemini 1.5 Flash available and adding more source links to reduce hallucinations.  

Gemini 1.5 Flash, previously only available to developers, is best suited for tasks requiring quick responses, such as answering customer queries. Google announced the model during its annual developer conference, Google I/O, in May but has since opened it up to the public. 

The model has a large context window, referring to how much information or words it processes at a time, of around 1 million tokens. Google said Gemini 1.5 Flash on the Gemini chatbot will have a context window of 32K tokens. A large context window allows for more complex questions and longer back-and-forth conversations. 

To take advantage of this, Google is updating the free version of Gemini to handle file uploads from Google Drive or devices. This has been a feature in Gemini Advanced, the paid version of the chatbot. 

When it first launched, Google claimed Gemini 1.5 Flash was 40% faster than OpenAI’s fast model GPT-3.5 Turbo. Gemini 1.5 Flash is not a small model like the Gemma family of Google models; instead, it is trained with the same data as Gemini 1.5 Pro. 

Gemini 1.5 Flash will be available on both mobile and desktop versions of Gemini. It can be accessed in more than 230 countries and territories and in 40 languages.

Reducing hallucinations with links 

Hallucinations continue to be a problem for AI models. Google is following the lead of other model providers and chatbots by adding related links to prompts asking for information. The idea is to show the AI models did not create the information without reference. 

“Starting today for English language prompts in certain countries, you can access this additional information on topics directly within Gemini’s responses. Just click on the chip at the end of a paragraph to see websites where you can dive deeper on a certain topic,” Google said in a blog post. 

The company said Gemini will add links to the relevant email if the information is in an email. 

Google will also add a double-check feature that “verifies responses by using Google Search to highlight which statements are corroborated or contradicted on the web.” 

Google is not the only company that adds links for attribution in line with the responses on a chatbot. ChatGPT and Perplexity regularly add citations and links to websites where they find information. 

However, a report from Nieman Labs found that the chatbots hallucinated some links, in some cases attaching links to news stories that do not exist or are completely unrelated.