why not just call it Gemini 2.5 Lite, i.e why flash moniker is necessary?

It's interesting that it seems to the non thinking variant has actually regressed on a quite few benchmarks compared to flash-2.0. They seem to be prioritizing coding above all else. Even the thinking variant only has marginal gains on non coding.

Our table parsing benchmarking has flash-2.0 at 0.84, flash-2.5-lite at 0.80 (non-thinking), flash-2.5-lite at 0.80 (thinking). Kind of unfortunate to see.

[1] https://github.com/Filimoa/rd-tablebench

Big update, they removed _preview from the model name.

does the lite version have a faster token output? or time to first token?