alt Hacker NewsYeah can't figure out WTH is going on in google's AI ecosystem either.
They absolutely deserve credit for their free tier API keys though. That's unheard of in big cloud - an actual you can't shoot yourself in the foot with a life ruining bill thing. Can't recall what part of their product maze I got it from but it seems to do what it says on tin
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You can sum it up as: Gemini from AI Studio and Gemini from Vertex AI Studio have independent rate limits.
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And I guess to add some context, it's because Google seemingly realized that Google Cloud moves so glacially slow, and has so much baggage, that they could no longer compete with scrappier startups like OpenAI and Anthropic on developer mindshare.
So there's a separate product org that owns AI Studio, which tries to be more nimble, and probably 50x'd Gemini adoption by using API Keys instead of Service Accounts and JSON certs that take mapping out the 9th circle of hell to deploy in some environments. (although iirc Vertex now has those)
They definitely do ship faster than Google Cloud, but their offerings actually end up feeling like a product team with fewer resources than OpenAI or Anthropic (like shipping purple tailwind-slop UIs as real features), which is just nuts.
The free tier is good but they've been cracking down on rate limits. Just recently they significantly dropped the max requests per day.