Okay this is a nitpick but why wouldn't you increment a part of the version number to signify that there is an improvement? These releases are confusing.
Anthropic kind of did the same thing [1] except it back-fired recently with the cries of "nerfing".
We buy these tokens, which are very hard to do in limited tiers, they expire after only a year, and we don't even know how often the responses are changing in the background. Even a 1% improvement or reduction I would want disclosed.
Really scary foundation AI companies are building on IMO. Transparency and access is important.
Sure and that is why you can call it 2.5.<whatever>
They just don't want to be pinned down because the shifting sands are useful for the time when the LLM starts to get injected with ads or paid influence.
I wish they would actually explain it like that somewhere. Or publish the internal version numbers they must certainly be using to ensure a proper development process.
I would assume that it will supersede the model that they currently have. So eventually 2.5 flash will be the new and improved 2.5 Flash rather than 2.6.
Same way that openai updated their 4-o models and the like, which didn't turn out so well when it started glazing everyone and they had to revert it (maybe that was just chat and not api)
Even if it was just chat and or API I have used the API and I know that they have at minimum added the retraining date and time that they could just affix to the Gemini 2.5 Flash and Flash-Lite because when I use the API I have to verify that the upgrade of the backend system didn't break anything and pinning versions I assume is pretty common.
Google has historically always made bad UX choices like this. Conway’s law definitely applies here. Too many different silos building every Google project.
Most of their products are server based so there's no version really. Also they kill stuff off before it would ever be v2 anyway. Also also, they're still better than Microsoft, see Xbox and Windows.
