Google Launches Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite for High-Speed, Low-Cost AI Scaling

Google announces Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, a lightweight, low-latency AI model positioned as faster and more cost-effective than prior Gemini 2.5 Flash variants, with pricing at $0.25 per million input tokens and $1.50 per million output tokens. The release emphasizes improved Time to First Token and throughput, benchmark victories, a configurable "Thinking Levels" feature to trade cognitive depth for speed/cost, and immediate access through the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and deployment on Vertex AI.