Gemini 2.5 Pro vs ZAYA1-74B-Preview

Pick Gemini 2.5 Pro if you want the stronger benchmark profile. ZAYA1-74B-Preview only becomes the better choice if knowledge is the priority or you want the cheaper token bill.

Gemini 2.5 Pro is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 65 to 58. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Gemini 2.5 Pro's sharpest advantage is in coding, where it averages 63.8 against 53.2. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is GPQA, 83% to 57.3%. ZAYA1-74B-Preview does hit back in knowledge, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

Gemini 2.5 Pro is also the more expensive model on tokens at $1.25 input / $10.00 output per 1M tokens, versus $0.00 input / $0.00 output per 1M tokens for ZAYA1-74B-Preview. That is roughly Infinityx on output cost alone. ZAYA1-74B-Preview is the reasoning model in the pair, while Gemini 2.5 Pro is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use. Gemini 2.5 Pro gives you the larger context window at 1M, compared with 256K for ZAYA1-74B-Preview.