Google announced Thursday that it is releasing Gemini 1.5 Flash, it’s snack-sized large language model and ChatGPT-4o mini competitor, to all users regardless of their subscription level.
The company promises “across-the-board improvements” in terms of response quality and latency, as well as “especially noticeable improvements in reasoning and image understanding.”
Google initially released Gemini 1.5 Flash in May as a lighterw-eight version of its flagship Gemini 1.5 Pro model. It’s designed to perform less resource intensive inference tasks faster and more efficiently than Pro does, much as Claude 3.5 Haiku, Llama 3.1-8B and ChatGPT-4o mini do for their respective parent models.
Flash’s context window is drastically expanding with this update, growing from a paltry 8K length to 32K (roughly 50 pages of text). Granted, that’s a 4x increase in size, but even at 32K, Gemini Flash’s context window is still just a quarter the size of GPT-4o mini’s 128K window (or, about a book’s worth).
What’s more, Google plans to “soon add” the ability to upload text and image files, either from Google Drive or the local hard drive, direct to the context window. This feature was previously restricted to the subscription tiers.
The company also announced updates on its efforts to reduce instances of hallucinations within its models. Google plans to include “links to related content for fact-seeking prompts in Gemini,” essentially providing links to the sources it cites.
The AI will do this for both traditional search and for associated Workspace apps as well. If the AI uses information gleaned through its Gmail integration, it will provide links back to the relevant emails.
These updates are available immediately to nearly all Gemini users on both web and mobile and in 40 languages. Teens who meet the minimum age requirements needed to manage their own Google accounts will receive access next week.
Mozilla is giving Firefox’s Smart Window two new tricks. If you haven’t tried it yet, Smart Window is an optional AI mode in Firefox with a built-in chat that helps you get things done while you browse. With this update, it can fill out online forms using details from your tabs and keep an eye on websites for you.
Tired of typing the same details into every form?
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.