SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 5 - Alphabet's Google on

Wednesday announced updates to its Gemini family of large

language models, including a new product line with competitive

pricing to low-cost artificial intelligence models like that of

Chinese rival DeepSeek.

The tech giant offers several versions of Gemini that vary

in price and performance. It already offered a lightweight

variant known as "Flash" but its new "Flash-Lite" model is even

cheaper.

On Wednesday, Google released Gemini 2.0 Flash to the

general public after previewing it to developers in December. It

also launched Flash-Lite and released a new version of its

flagship "Pro" model into test phases.

Google created Flash-Lite after receiving positive feedback

about the 1.5 version of Flash, Koray Kavukcuoglu, chief

technology officer of Google's DeepMind AI lab, said in a press

release. Gemini 2.0 Flash is costlier than its predecessor.

The cost to develop AI models and, in turn, the cost to use

them have come under investor scrutiny in recent weeks after

DeepSeek revealed it spent less than $6 million on the final

training run of a model. Developers at leading U.S. AI firms

said the total cost was likely magnitudes larger.

Still, DeepSeek's rise drew questions on the earnings calls

of Alphabet and rivals Microsoft ( MSFT ) and Meta. All

have so far signaled intent to continue massive capital

expenditures in the field.

Alphabet shares slumped Tuesday in part due to investor

pessimism around a planned capex hike that was 29% higher than

Wall Street expected.

Certain inputs on Gemini Flash-Lite cost $0.019 per 1

million tokens, a term for the units of data processed by an AI

model. That compares to $0.075 on the cost-efficient version of

OpenAI's flagship model and $0.014 on DeepSeek's cheap model,

though DeepSeek states on its website that the pricing will

increase fivefold on Feb. 8.