As announced last week, Google is rolling out a major change to the Gemini app experience for users on the free plan. Additionally, everyone has access to levels of thinking or “effort.”
Free “no plan” users can no longer manually change models. Officially, their only option in the selector is “Auto” with “Gemini 3 Models”. Last week, Google’s support documentation called it (3.5) Flash-Lite.
Google says: “Gemini will use automatic template selection to send each prompt to the Gemini template that best suits it. Most prompts will go to Flash-Lite, our fastest template. Prompts that require more in-depth reasoning can go to Flash or Pro.”
In the meantime:
If Smart Template Selection is turned off, chats for users without an AI plan will use Flash-Lite for all replies.
Google is also rolling out new “Effort Levels” that replace the old “Extended” option. These three choices correspond to “thinking levels” in Google AI Studio and Antigravity:
- Low: fast and effective
- Medium: Balanced depth
- High: Extra thorough
This evening we are seeing the deployment of the free change to the vast majority of our free accounts (PT). Google seems to be rolling out this update fairly quickly.
The new effort levels will be available to all subscribers and are also currently rolling out.
Meanwhile, Google AI Plus users will soon be limited to Flash-Lite and (3.8) Flash.
Old versus new
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