Has anyone ever received more than 1 candidate in the response array?

Gemini API
,
1

I understand the principle behind having candidates as an array, and how it allows the model to provide a variety of responses to you to pick from. But has anyone ever actually had Gemini do that?

We’ve sent tens of thousands of prompts to various Gemini models and never once have we seen the candidates array contain more than one element.

Even when trying to force it to do so, with some ambiguous questions, it still never does it.

Anyone else?

3

To get multiple candidates from Gemini, you need to specify the desired number of candidates in the request configuration. For example:

response = client.models.generate_content(
    model="gemini-2.5-flash",
    contents="what is an AI",
    config=types.GenerateContentConfig(
        candidateCount=2
    )
)