[chrisheecho]

simonw, good points. The Vertex vs. non-Vertex Gemini API (via AI Studio at aistudio.google.com) could use more clarity.

For folks just wanting to get started quickly with Gemini models without the broader platform capabilities of Google Cloud, AI Studio and its associated APIs are recommended as you noted.

However, if you anticipate your use case to grow and scale 10-1000x in production, Vertex would be a worthwhile investment.

[troupo]

Why create two different APIs that are the same, but only subtly different, and have several different SDKs?

[chrisheecho]

I think you are talking about generativeai vs. vertexai vs. genai sdk.

And you are watching us evolve overtime to do better.

Couple clarifications 1. Going forward we only recommend using genai SDK 2. Subtle API differences - this is a bit harder to articulate but we are working to improve this. Please dm at @chrischo_pm if you would like to discuss further :)

[troupo]

So. Three different SDKs.

No idea what any of those SDK names mean. But sure enoough searching will bring up all three of them for different combination of search terms, and none of them will point to the "recommend only using <a random name that is indistinguishable form other names>"

Oh, And some of these SDKs (and docs) do have a way to use this functionality without the SDKs, but not others. Because there are only 4 languages in the world, and everyone should be happy using them.

[mark_l_watson]

I think you can strongly influence which SDK your customers use by keeping the Python, Typescript, and Curl examples in the documentation up to date and uniformly use what you consider the ‘best’ SDK in the examples.

Overall, I think that Google has done a great job recently in productizing access to your models. For a few years I wrote my own utilities to get stuff done, now I do much less coding using Gemini (and less often ChatGPT) because the product offerings do mostly what I want.

One thing I would like to see Google offer is easier integrated search with LLM generation. The ‘grounding’ examples are OK, but for use in Python I buy a few Perplexity API credits and use that for now. That is the single thing I would most like to see you roll out.

EDIT: just looked at your latest doc pages, I like the express mode setup with a unified access to regular APIs vs. Vertex.

[chrisheecho]

Thanks! - I like it too :)