Gemini Decisions API

(blog.google)

503 points | by iamdelirium 20 hours ago ago

88 comments

  • muzani 4 hours ago

    This appears the first decision AI that actually handles audio, video, and PDF, and I'm surprised this isn't highlighted everywhere.

    Marketing seems to have dropped the ball on that. I doubt anyone's picking it for the +2% higher points, but being able to answer based on a PDF or call is groundbreaking.

    Jev is still faster and cheaper for many of the common text uses.

    • brap 3 hours ago

      >Marketing seems to have dropped the ball on that

      Google's marketing consistently drops the ball on every opportunity so that's not surprising at all

  • eminence32 19 hours ago

    I'm sort of surprised it took Jev for everyone to realize "oh yeah, this is a useful thing that we should have in our product portfolio".

    But maybe this is one of those things that's only obvious in retrospect? I'm sure people were trying something similar years ago with grammar-constrained outputs (for example to only output a simple json structure), but you can't get probabilities out of the model that way. Which makes me wonder: how do these models calculate probabilities?

    • janalsncm 18 hours ago

      A lot of AI stuff is like that, actually. GPT 2 and 3 were mainly curiosities that would get articles on tech news sites but didn’t attract much attention from the general public. But after RLHF the UX improved dramatically and ChatGPT became mainstream. A lot of MLEs underestimate how much UX matters, and the same is true for Jev.

      > how do these models calculate probabilities?

      The short answer is: more and better data.

      The long answer is: probably the same way any other classifier does. Take your ground truth probabilities and your predicted probabilities. The gap between those is called cross entropy, which is used to push the model towards the correct probabilities.

    • redmalang 10 hours ago

      Dont under estimate the power of branding/positioning/marketing. For more than a year I have been using a RL'd Qwen fine tune optimised for just taking a decision and outputting the decision number, initially I didnt have much training data so after a few manual examples I asked deepseek to make them for me and had codex train it. I compared it to jev when it first came out and it was mostly neck and neck for my use case. I can't have been the only one in fact, I'm sure there must have been other people who probably even open sourced, but I couldn't find anything. I think the question going forward will be how does one keep abreast of interesting stuff happening, now that its de-coupled from direct human labour so de-bottlenecked on production capacity - just bound by how residual time/attention one has (Terence Tao was talking about this exact predicament in the latest tyler cowen podcast).

      The natural path of things, I suppose, is those that have a soapbox/distribution will just get larger...

    • JamesSwift 18 hours ago

      I think its more like how LLMs caught everyone by surprise. A reasonable person would not think such a simple system would have been this effective, and yet here we are. Distilling that system down even further into a decision model again does not seem like it should work. But it seems to.

      The whole system is foreign to us, and makes us rethink what "intelligence" actually is.

    • RomanKornev 16 hours ago

      That's how the original Transformer architecture (LaMDA) should have been released back in the day, but Google thought it would cannibalize their search revenue.

    • nlpnerd 8 hours ago

      Basically there is a whole host of tarpit usage of LLMs in application backends today. This is simply another case of LLMs enabling people to build what they cannot productionize or maintain.

      Today developers without any AI/ML skillset can prototype a fancy new feature with LLMs, what used to require collecting and curating data to train a pipeline of ML models then serving them in production.

      The problem comes when it's time to take the new feature into production. That $20 cost with prototype/beta workload is now $30k per month in LLM costs, and those hallucinations that never happened on their 200 test samples is happening 600 times per day.

      They are then stuck, because they lack the knowledge and budget to build and run the production ML pipeline properly, the infra stack necessary to handle production workload. Management also doesn't understand why they have to invest in rebuilding something that "seems to work" with "outdated methods".

      These system one or decision models are a step up from LLMs when it comes to this usage. Problem is that they are still difficult to work with (limited in expression power) for many application logic. Despite the initial popularity, I hear about a lot of frictions refactoring LLM based backend with them, and multiple cases of production rollbacks to LLMs already.

      I think system one models is a sensible paradigm, but there is a lot more work needed above the model layer to make this work.

    • phillennium 7 hours ago

      That also makes me wonder: what other things are achieved by now and are up for grabs, and that will seem obvious in retrospect, but we don't notice it yet?

      Roughly speaking, has AGI actually been achieved two years ago and we go around don't noticing that?

    • visarga 9 hours ago

      > Which makes me wonder: how do these models calculate probabilities?

      By unprincipled methods. To calibrate confidence in an answer you need a task specific calibration set. You can't pre-calibrate for tasks unknown ahead of time, which is the case for most uses of decision models.

    • ashdksnndck 17 hours ago

      We were doing zero and few-shot classification with LLMs since before they could reliably complete whole sentences. It’s an easier task than generating coherent text. The model needed to be tuned for classification (not generation) and for the domain, but it would often succeed at new classification tasks with a simple description.

      I guess given the huge advances in LLM since then, these models probably achieve much better accuracy on a wide range of domains with lower effort compared to what we were doing, which makes it compelling as a product. And yeah, the models probably were already good enough a few years ago too. Other factors include how easy it is to release products at high speed now, and the desire in the industry to reduce token spend.

    • NitpickLawyer 18 hours ago

      You can do it with LLMs by looking at the logprobs of ('yes', 'Yes', 'YES'...) vs. ('no'...). This works for bool or whatever they call it in jev space nool I think?

      You can do it manually or use ready made libs. I know there's one in python on top of vllm that can do something like this.

    • jgalt212 16 hours ago

      > I'm sort of surprised it took Jev for everyone to realize "oh yeah, this is a useful thing that we should have in our product portfolio".

      Because it's especially parsimonious with token use.

    • fny 12 hours ago

      Why introduce a feature that would cut token use by 1000x?

    • nrightnour 17 hours ago

      OpenAI was already working on a Decisions API, and Jev launched theirs quickly enough to have 1 week in the spotlight before OpenAI put theirs in beta (which works great btw).

  • v18a 9 hours ago

    A couple of weeks back, someone had posted this on HN - an interesting note about the problems with asking LLMs for confidence: https://rumple.github.io/blog/2026/10/20/asking-llm-for-conf...

  • kodoman 17 hours ago

    I have still not used a decision model, How are people using them at the moment? is any one using them in a coding harness like Pi?

    • LaurensBER 16 hours ago

      I've found that they work great as gates ("does this require a human review?") or filters ("is this suspicious?") and occasionally as judges (based on this context, is the expected pain score for this user above 7.5/10?).

    • richardw 12 hours ago

      I used it to classify 10k ish repos for https://hnrepos.com/

      I like that it’s fairly deterministic, with a bit of variation. Think very low temperature rather than perfectly repeatable. I just didn’t want the randomness that comes from token by token execution even at low temps.

      I’ve also used it for “does this contain an entity”, and then I run an LLM to extract the entities. Saves on the LLM cost.

    • lprd 12 hours ago

      Yep, I use pi-warden (https://github.com/DevMortimer/pi-warden) as part of my workflow.

    • billylo 15 hours ago

      I adopted it as a super-fast credibility scan on the text (both the online version and the offline decision api inside chrome.

      https://chromestatus.com/feature/5155080092385280 https://evergreen-labs.org/products/credibility-analyzer

    • caseydm 17 hours ago

      I'm using them to label training data for model development. You can do something like label a bunch of records with Jev, then train the model, then check results with opus and a hold-out set.

    • Topfi 14 hours ago

      Selecting between user-provided tags to provide quick suggestions, semantic search, that sort of stuff.

    • skapadia 12 hours ago

      Task classification - given a set of classes, return the most likely class for each task

      Guardrails - check the text against a set of guardrail checks (questions)

      Search - Given a search criteria, I first have an LLM generate a query that would go to the decision model. This query is a rubric that scores each document. The highest scoring documents become the search hits. This is fast and cheap, so you can use it as a cross-encoder for your entire set, instead of just as a final re-ranker.

    • gopalv 12 hours ago

      > How are people using them at the moment?

      We use it for our critique looping within our own harness.

      But decision models can do things like write SQL queries, if you're willing to put a little bit of trickery upfront.

      My team's writing a paper about it for ICDE 2027 as we speak (as a follow-up to the DICE demo/paper from VLDB 2014).

      But my Linkedin post[1] has a quick summary of the idea, without explaining everything we do there.

      [1] - https://lnkd.in/p/gAsWcrCd

    • benhurmarcel 5 hours ago

      Does anyone use it to classify LLM harness tool requests? Between allow, ask, deny.

    • tirumaraiselvan 11 hours ago

      Here is a recent case study on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50436640

    • bushbaba 15 hours ago

      Tool routing. For example which MCP or Skill should i use for a given question.

      Evals. is this hitting the criteria or not? (Test case passes or fails)

    • Mengkudulangsat 12 hours ago

      Game modding. I wanted to create a decent opponent AI for w40k on tabletop simulator.

    • sky2224 13 hours ago

      I work in manufacturing and would like to use LLMs for scenarios where there's obviously still rules for what should happen next, but there's just so many variables that I can't just code it into a decision tree easily.

      As an example: I could have something I'm building fail. If I take a picture of it, can I see that it's

      1) a false failure

      2) salvageable

           2a) decision-tree for *who* to send it to for reworking things
      
      3) scrap

      As I think of the above decision tree, I see some problems where I'm just asking myself, "why wouldn't I just use <insert a lot of options you can probably guess here>?".

      I'll be honest, I think right now decision models are in a "solution looking for a problem stage", but I think there's opportunity still.

    • conception 16 hours ago

      Email filtering, ticket triage/categorization/etc.

    • te_chris 17 hours ago

      Yes, literally built my own version of /goal in Claude/codex today for pi using jev. My agent was stopping so jev is called each turn to see if it’s done or not - similar to how it works in Claude, according to Claude…

  • vintermann an hour ago

    Hm, it looks like they use Jev terminology ("noul") if not outright Jev syntax, but the word "Jev" doesn't seem to be mentioned at all. Bit of a dick move to a much smaller competitor to not acknowledge the influence.

  • waximabbax 20 hours ago

    Its bit more expensive than other other Decision Models in the same lane.

    However, it can accept Audio and Video as input as well and for those specific cases it can be extremely useful.

    • jermaustin1 17 hours ago

      Image input is a primary reason I've never moved off my "home rolled" version of Jev (that Claude wrote for me over a year ago) for my file organizer/indexer. Takes images resizes them to 1k, then asks a handful of questions about the image for tagging purposes. It is able to process around 3 images a second based on Qwen 3 VL, but distilled and optimized for 1k images and up to 2048 token inputs (after the system prompt, then the questions are asked one after each other reusing the cache). Documents that are longer than that end up going through a summarizer that runs on my other GPU (Qwen 3.6, I think). And all of that gets fed into a vector search engine, for easy lookup later.

      I'm not even sure what all is going on inside it anymore, because I just add new features when they popup, and tell Claude to do it, and it let's me know when it is done, and every new "input feature" can run against the entire catalogue of files.

  • gtoubassi an hour ago

    Can anyone report real world latency? their reported p50 seems strong but no better than I think what I've seen with typesafe JEV (which in our experience is a bit faster than openai decisions api)

  • 2001zhaozhao 16 hours ago

    We're about at the point where the AI is now pretty insanely cheap. Passing 100K tokens of context then asking hundreds of questions of 100 tokens each would cost about as much as a single Google search API call.

    Out of the hundreds of questions, most of them could even be different variations of the same question to capture more nuance than what is normally possible in a single multiple-choice.

    • LaurensBER 16 hours ago

      When I reviewed our internal AI workflows i was shocked at how often a decision API was a good fit or could streamline the process.

      Being able to get a fast, high quality answer to the question "does this warrant interrupting a human?" or "does this look suspicious?" was a game changer for us.

      I was also shocked to see that after a week of heavily experimenting I did not even burn through 5 USD!

  • theanonymousone 18 hours ago

    The best decision model I have used (besides Jev itself) is respan/span-02, which is based on (finetuned from?) Gemma4 26A4. That makes me optimistic for this release, despite the high cost.

  • flockonus 10 hours ago

    At 0.10/M this feels very overpriced vs Liquid's 0.02/M, which on my own tests (text input) is very capable.

    Wish they provided more comprehensive inputs to the model's capabilities and comparisons.

    • cube00 9 hours ago

      I wouldn't even trust this is the high level of their pricing with the way they just casually doubled Gemini Omni pricing in 1.2 while trying to spin that it was somehow "cheaper"

  • amelius 4 hours ago

    Can't LLMs just "degrade" into decision APIs whenever possible/necessary?

    Why does this need to be a separate thing?

    • remus 3 hours ago

      They generally use smaller, more specialised models which are substantially cheaper for similar performance e.g. https://strandsagents.com/blog/amazon-saves-millions-replaci...

    • mattmaroon 3 hours ago

      You could instruct them to behave like one but they’ll still eat a lot of tokens, probably more, even though you’ll save a small amount on the output. It’s a separate thing because of significant token savings.

  • nico 17 hours ago

    For anyone wanting something local, private, faster, which can also run and train on CPU, checkout https://http://jeffyclassify.com/

    It comes with a bunch of pre trained classifiers, and you can use the tooling to train your own

    There are also integrations with workflow tools like n8n

  • abhikul0 18 hours ago

    There’s also this guide by google to use embedding gemma 2 as a decision maker. Wonder how these compare.

    https://developers.google.com/edge/mediapipe/solutions/decis...

    • ilaksh 17 hours ago

      Right. I also wonder how it compares to Strands Decisions with E4B or whatever.

  • Topfi 13 hours ago

    Audio, Video and File input? That is very appealing and I can imagine a few very unique ways to leverage this if it works well across all modalities.

    For what it's worth, ran my quick and dirty evals with it and got in many usage scenarios a 4x lower brier over Jev (2x - 6x depending on task), which is an immense improvement and the first time a model so significantly has outperformed Jev in my experience. p50 was also over 100ms lower though all this cost twice as much across the entire eval end-to-end.

    Dare I say, this is a very impressive release by the Gemini team. While testing GPT-6 Luna lead to an honestly very pleasant interaction with OpenAI staff on here, it did perform very uncompetitively so seeing a great first effort in basic text classification performance with broad multimodality, that is great to see. Course, wouldn't be surprised if Google had such a more broadly trained classifier for years as part of internal usage for platform features which they just now commercialised, but hey, I'll take it.

  • kaycebasques 18 hours ago
  • vesterde 18 hours ago

    Anyone hear anything around when it might land in Vertex? As far as I can tell it's just in AI Studio for now.

  • wasabi991011 17 hours ago

    Surprised how close all these models are on the benchmarks

    • keyle 17 hours ago

      That would be just a sign that we need better benchmarks

    • muzani 12 hours ago

      It's practically the same as Jev, but by Google

  • holografix 17 hours ago

    Google ensuring “share of wallet” from their existing customer base with a solid but not great “we do it too” product, priced to capitalise on risk and change aversion.

    Standard practice by the big G.

    • SchemaLoad 16 hours ago

      That's always been the enterprise tech way. Using the product that comes with the platform the company is already signed up to pay for is easier than requesting a payment to a brand new service.

      They don't need to be the best, they just need to not force a customer to go elsewhere.

    • twelvechairs 14 hours ago

      Enterprise gonna enterprise.

      I suppose the key question is come 5 years time is enterprise going to just become happy to use openrouter, or will they lose competitiveness/ market share to those who do.

      Fyi artificialanalysis currently puts drex highest on price vs quality

      https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/artificial-analysi...

    • hbarka 17 hours ago

      What got me into Claude Code started with Google Antigravity. Somewhere along the way Antigravity took a dive. The rollout was great, then it started feeling like other G-products, the dreaded tail of lackluster developer energy after a peak.

  • low_tech_punk 15 hours ago

    Google shipped a "Decision Maker" API a while ago, see https://developers.google.com/edge/mediapipe/solutions/decis...

    Apparently the two teams aren't talking to each other.

    • bagacrap 11 hours ago

      That is part of media pipe which does local inference. Not that it would be the first time Google shipped products that competed with each other

  • tomaskafka 14 hours ago

    Opaque classifier as a service, for when you want to discriminate people by race and social status assumed from name, but want some other entity to be responsible for plausible deniability of the process.

    Hey Jev, what mortgage rate multiplier should a person named James Smith get?

    • BoorishBears 13 hours ago

      This is literally the closest thing for an antidote to that.

  • 0815beck 7 hours ago

    "should this person get citizen status, gemini give me a quick yes no" man i hate the future

    • blitzar 4 hours ago

      "should we bomb this school? gemini give me a quick yes"

  • londons_explore 18 hours ago

    Presuming this started when Jev was released... If so, thats pretty quick time to release for Google.

  • florkbork 19 hours ago

    Meanwhile, they are suffocating Jules today (https://killedbygoogle.com/) with a metaphorical pillow to the face and no migration path mapped out for casual users apart from "use antigravity" in a 1 line high banner; after about a year of existence.

    It seems unlikely this will be around in 6 months at this rate.

    • Catloafdev 19 hours ago

      That doesn't make any sense, this is a Jev competitor and a model release, like their Carbon and Argon models. It won't simply be 'killed' like apps might without something to succeed it.

    • panarky 17 hours ago

      Antigravity is far superior to Jules.

      I say plant a thousand flowers and cull the ones that don't bloom.

    • kasperset 19 hours ago

      Barring Search, Gmail, and YouTube I am really wary of using anything from Google now.

  • pratzc07 18 hours ago

    So is it over for Jev now that the big boys are in the game

    • brandall10 18 hours ago

      They just got a huge round, almost a billion in financing - that was after OAI Decisions API was released. I really wonder what their next move is.

    • clhodapp 14 hours ago

      I guess it depends on how many good ideas Typesafe AI have. They never said that they were only about decision models.

    • mikeocool 16 hours ago

      It’s been a little while since I’ve looked, but when the first round of jev competitors came out, jev was still significantly faster.

      Getting a response in 250ms opens up a lot possibilities over 750ms.

    • ai-x 18 hours ago

      Startup / Founder focus vs Large Organizations with no vision. With AI, we know distribution moat really doesn't matter and Google doesn't have a great Developer distribution moat anyway

    • BoorishBears 10 hours ago

      "Input blocked: the prompt contains sensitive words that violate Google’s Generative AI Prohibited Use policy"

      No I think Jev will do just fine. Not because Google can't even ship this day 1 on their enterprise platform (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeupHxao3ajUvl9Dt7l...) but has time for moralizing a decision API.

      It's not the spirit of a competitive company.

  • iamdelirium 20 hours ago

    Looks like Google announced their own Jev inspired API and model

    • dude250711 19 hours ago

      It was a hot topic 2 months ago.

  • claiir 18 hours ago

    Why’s the probability type called “noul”?

  • 5555watch 17 hours ago

    I still don't really understand where and why these decisions or Jev is useful or interesting? Is there a clear demonstration or tldr anywhere?

    • npc99 17 hours ago

      Routing, classification, replacement for LLM-as-judge

  • perching_aix 15 hours ago

    I still have no idea why this is useful. Models are atrocious without reasoning, for classification and otherwise, and this doesn't even just eschew reasoning afaik, but parts of the models as well for lower latency and cost. I genuinely do not see the point.

    What differentiates this from training a classifier model? That it comes pretrained with general knowledge?

    • foopod 13 hours ago

      I think that is exactly the value prop, you don't need to train a classifier. You get something that works well enough to validate your product/feature/whatever before investing in training.

  • IncreasePosts 19 hours ago

    It took OpenAI 2 weeks after Jev to release a decision end point, and now google does it 2 months later. Why such a difference? Bureaucracy? Quality control?

    • iamdelirium 18 hours ago

      Looking at their benchmarks, it's actually a better model than OpenAI and Jev (which in the same evals is worst than Jev?).

    • antonvs 17 hours ago

      Why is that important to you? Seems a bit twitchy.