Google joins the 'yes/no' API gold rush

Google has launched its Gemini Decisions API, a specialized tool designed to answer straightforward, closed-ended questions. The underlying model, called Gemini Decision 1, can handle up to 1,000 independent queries in one go, supporting text, images, audio, and videos. It scores different options and returns probabilities with confidence scores in under a quarter of a second. Google claims it's already using the API internally for tasks like routing requests in its notebook tool, prototyping designs, and running safety checks on search results.

The model is priced at a tenth of a cent per million input tokens, which Google says makes it about five times cheaper than its own Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite model. It's available now, with support for popular development platforms. This follows a recent trend where several other major tech companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft, and Cloudflare, have all rushed out nearly identical 'decision model' APIs in the last few weeks, turning a simple function into the latest bandwagon everyone wants to jump on.