Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite is Google’s stripped-down, multimodal transformer that handles text, images, audio, and short video while swallowing up to a million tokens. It prioritizes speed and price—responses start in ~6 ms and cost about $0.10 in, $0.40 out per million tokens—beating Gemini 1.5 Flash on most benchmarks without chasing GPT-4-level depth.
Use it when you need cheap, real-time output: customer-support chatbots, quick code fixes, bulk transcription, or other high-throughput tasks. Skip it for Olympiad-style math or heavyweight reasoning, but if latency and budget trump perfection, this is the pragmatic choice.