Couldn't agree more about the google product offerings. Vertex AI? AI Studio? Maker studio? Gemini? The documentation is fragmented with redundant offerings making it confusing to determine what is what. GCS billing is complicated to figure out vs OpenAI billing or anthropic.

Sad part is Google does offer a ChatML/OpenAI compliant endpoint to do LLM calls and I believe they in an experiment also reduced friction in getting an API key to start making calls right away but discoverability ever remains a challenge with google services.

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int_19h an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> I believe they in an experiment also reduced friction in getting an API key to start making calls right away

This part is very easy now: you sign into https://aistudio.google.com/ and then click "Get API key" in the lower left corner.

The problem is that features and docs are still scattered all over. Some thing can only be done via Vertex, for example.

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byefruit 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I've just found myself using OpenRouter if we need Google models for a project, it's worth the extra 5% just not to have to deal with the utter disaster that is their product offering.

	▲	IanCal 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		FWIW I had to bail on the same thing because my results were drastically different. There was something happening with images through open router. Although outside of that I’d absolutely do the same thing, their apis are awful and billing worse. Maybe it makes sense for huge orgs but it’s a nightmare on the smaller scale.