Google introduces new class of cheap AI models as cost concerns intensify

San Francisco: Google on Wednesday announced updates to its Gemini family of large language models, including a new product line with competitive pricing to low-cost artificial intelligence models like that of Chinese rival DeepSeek. Google created Flash-Lite after receiving positive feedback about the 1.5 version of Flash, Koray Kavukcuoglu, chief technology officer of Google's DeepMind AI lab, said in a press release. Certain inputs on Gemini Flash-Lite cost $0.019 per 1 million tokens, a term for the units of data processed by an AI model. That compares to $0.075 on the cost-efficient version of OpenAI's flagship model and $0.014 on DeepSeek's cheap model, though DeepSeek states on its website that the pricing will increase fivefold on Feb. 8.