It makes responses much slower with zero benefit for many tasks. Flash with thinking off is very fast.

The moment you start charging for preview stuff I think you give a tacit agreement that you can expect the price to not increase by a factor of 4.

Gmail was in beta for what, 2 decades? Did you never use it during that time? They've been using these "Preview" models on their non-technical user facing Gemini app and product for months now. Like, Google themselves has been using them in production, on their main apps. And gemini-1.5-pro is 2 months from depreciation and there was no production alternative.

They told everyone to build their stuff on top of it, and then jacked up the price by 4x. Just pointing to some fine print doesn't change that.

I'd be more worried about Google just discontinuing another product. For example Stadia was similarly high profile, but it's gone now.

More examples here: https://killedbygoogle.com/

I wonder if you can hide the latency, especially for voice?

What I have in mind is to start the voice response with a non-thinking model, say a sentence or two in a fraction of a second. That will take the voice model a few seconds to read out. In that time, you use a thinking model to start working on the next part of the response?

In a sense, very similar to how everyone knows to stall in an interview by starting with 'this is a very good question...', and using that time to think some more.