This is a new video model. It is not a replacement for Gemini 4, it is doing something altogether different.
It has been available, since yesterday, within Google Flow. I know, because I used it yesterday. Creatives normally are using Flow or similar third party tools, not APIs or AI Studio. The claim here is that there is more character consistency, which is helpful if true. But that's not something I can see from a little work. Despite the "More Affordable" claim, it costs more, and the outputs doesn't, from my limited experience so far, seem to be significantly better. So I could only, personally, justify pulling this up when character consistency is punching me in the face. Which, to be fair, is a lot of the time, both in my experience, and the experience of other AI film makers I talk to.
This isn't for (most) coders, it hardly matters if it shows up on Flow a little earlier that Google Vids, and, perhaps, it is a little silly to act like it is a nightmare that a rollout occurs over a few days, especially the rollout prioritizes the paying creatives on the tool that are most likely to use.
The "omni" naming for a video-only model is so confusing. I was under the impression omni referred to models that can output text and audio too.
To my understanding it has nothing to do with output and entirely to do with the understanding of the input together as basically one input stream. An LLM with a vision encoder or audio encoder takes the media and turns them into tokens the LLM reads and then turns into its text latents (basically).
It’s like the difference between me looking at a picture, describing it to you, and then you trying to form that picture in your mind. You might get close, but it will never be the picture I’m looking at. If I then ask you questions about the picture, you can’t answer any questions about any details that I didn’t describe. I believe that is exactly the information and understanding loss that an Omni model attempts to address, which doesn’t have anything to do with output.
Some models do also offer “Omni” output, but that is more like a feature of the model than what Omni models are by design I think.
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It's double the cost in Flow, but 30% cheaper via the API. And Flow has always been much cheaper than the API (by 5-6x).
Right now
Omni 1.2 is showing 18 credit cost in Flow for a six second video.
vs.
10 credits costs for a 6 second video using Omni 1.1.
I'm not sure it's in Google's interest to talk about how much cheaper the model is, while also increasing the cost in Flow.
(but I'm happy for people using the API)
It shows me that single prompt costs 30 credits. Also shows that 50 credits refresh daily, so I can make 1 video per day for free. I did one, with 20 credits remaining.