<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>Deathmax</author><text>Gemini models on Vertex AI can be called via a preview OpenAI-compatible endpoint [1], but shoving it into existing tooling where you don&amp;#x27;t have programmatic control over the API key and is long lived is non-trivial because GCP uses short lived access tokens (and long-lived ones are not great security-wise).&lt;p&gt;Billing for the Gemini models (on Vertex AI, the Generative Language AI variant still charges by tokens) I would argue is simpler than every other provider, simply because you&amp;#x27;re charged by characters&amp;#x2F;image&amp;#x2F;video-second&amp;#x2F;audio-second and don&amp;#x27;t need to run a tokenizer (if it&amp;#x27;s even available &lt;i&gt;cough&lt;/i&gt; Claude 3 and Gemini) and having to figure out what the chat template is to calculate the token cost per message [2] or figure out how to calculate tokens for an image [3] to get cost estimates before actually submitting the request and getting usage info back.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;cloud.google.com&amp;#x2F;vertex-ai&amp;#x2F;generative-ai&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;multimodal&amp;#x2F;call-gemini-using-openai-library&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;cloud.google.com&amp;#x2F;vertex-ai&amp;#x2F;generative-ai&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;multim...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;platform.openai.com&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;guides&amp;#x2F;text-generation&amp;#x2F;managing-tokens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;platform.openai.com&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;guides&amp;#x2F;text-generation&amp;#x2F;mana...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;platform.openai.com&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;guides&amp;#x2F;vision&amp;#x2F;calculating-costs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;platform.openai.com&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;guides&amp;#x2F;vision&amp;#x2F;calculating-c...&lt;/a&gt;</text><parent_chain><item><author>luke-stanley</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s fairly easy to pay OpenAI or Mistral money to use their API&amp;#x27;s.
Figuring out how Google Cloud Vertex works and how it&amp;#x27;s billed is more complicated. Azure and AWS are similar in how complex they are to use for this.
Could Google Cloud please provide an OpenAI compatible API and service?
I know it&amp;#x27;s a different department. But it&amp;#x27;d make using your models way easier.
It often feels like Google Cloud has no UX or end-user testing done on it at all (not true for aistudio.google.com - that is better than before, for sure!).</text></item><item><author>alekandreev</author><text>Hello (again) from the Gemma team! We are quite excited to push this release out and happy to answer any questions!&lt;p&gt;Opinions are our own and not of Google DeepMind.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size [pdf]</title><url>https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemma/gemma-2-report.pdf</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>ankeshanand</author><text>If you&amp;#x27;re an individual developer and not an enterprise, just go straight to Google AIStudio or GeminiAPI instead: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;aistudio.google.com&amp;#x2F;app&amp;#x2F;apikey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;aistudio.google.com&amp;#x2F;app&amp;#x2F;apikey&lt;/a&gt;. It&amp;#x27;s dead simple getting an API key and calling with a rest client.</text><parent_chain><item><author>luke-stanley</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s fairly easy to pay OpenAI or Mistral money to use their API&amp;#x27;s.
Figuring out how Google Cloud Vertex works and how it&amp;#x27;s billed is more complicated. Azure and AWS are similar in how complex they are to use for this.
Could Google Cloud please provide an OpenAI compatible API and service?
I know it&amp;#x27;s a different department. But it&amp;#x27;d make using your models way easier.
It often feels like Google Cloud has no UX or end-user testing done on it at all (not true for aistudio.google.com - that is better than before, for sure!).</text></item><item><author>alekandreev</author><text>Hello (again) from the Gemma team! We are quite excited to push this release out and happy to answer any questions!&lt;p&gt;Opinions are our own and not of Google DeepMind.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size [pdf]</title><url>https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemma/gemma-2-report.pdf</url></story>