Other thoughts: I really think Google has fallen behind here. Even as a high speed offering (this build took ~7min, which is pretty good!), it wont be able to claim dominance for long with cerebras announcing the Sol preview today: https://www.cerebras.ai/blog/accelerating-gpt-5-6-sol-ultraf... .
It's not a bad model by any means, but I just don't know what situation I'd reach for 3.7 Flash first for. Google really needs a differentiator, especially given how hard it is to get an API key from them. They can't be high friction and non-pareto.
Can you help me understand how it is hard to get an API key from Google? You just head on over to http://aistudio.google.com/api-keys and create a key... not any different from platform.openai.com?
Disclaimer: I work in Google so it might be that this link is not publicly well known
Disclaimer that I haven't tried this since January, so things may have changed in the last 7mo, but this was my experience at that time: https://x.com/pwnies/status/2010523020629274723
At a high level though, as a rule of thumb Google assumes that they're serving companies at Google scale first, and at a human scale second. For other companies it's the opposite. Generally what that means is the first experience you get with a Google product will route you through 8 different dashboards to set up ACLs before you've hired your 2nd employee.
Similar experience here, for what it's worth, though I didn't get as far as you. I basically just stopped and didn't bother - it was easier to go through OpenRouter than spend more energy on it.
Also:
> Google assumes that they're serving companies at Google scale first
So much this. I'm currently grandfathered in until the end of the year on Google's Search API, but the $35,000 they want to continue usage of my < 1000 personal searches per month, not going to happen. It has honestly been easier to use Anthropic to help me build my own search index & crawling infrastructure than deal with Google.
It's not an assumption that the customer is Google scale that led the $35k monthly price point. It was that you (and many others like you) are breaking the terms of service (which state you are not supposed to store, process or analyze the search results). It was an API built for a different era, that doesn't really exist anymore.
> It has honestly been easier to use Anthropic to help me build my own search index & crawling infrastructure than deal with Google.
That's great to hear! FWIW I agree with you that it's harder for independent professionals to get started on Google dev services than others, but the Search API is not developer service and was never intended to be.
Huh. I'm not storing the Google search results, and my local supplementary index is built from my own crawling, not from URLs from Google searches. But if re-ranking is regarded as processing & analyzing, then I'll remove the Google API calls now (and... done).
Brave, Mojeek & Marginalia and EU Search Perspective have certainly been much friendlier to deal with.
The current move to force the usage of their AI api from postpay to prepay is also another example. (At least it’s going to give me the last incentive to move to cheaper api)
> they're serving companies at Google scale first
I think that's actually a very interesting insight that would be helpful for PMs on GCloud to take note of. As a single founder, setting up Google Cloud, it's like they start out by assuming you're bigco, forcing (I assume most) of their users into a arduous process of removing components they don't need.
Google AI Studio is one of Google's solutions to this problem, but in typical Google fashion, it's bolted-on without any clear connection in the ecosystem. If you're also using GCloud, it's hard to remember it's even there.
OpenAI's platform, by contrast, is streamlined, easy to use. With Google, I feel like I need to wade through the documentation first before even using the darn thing.
This is a meme within Google already. People even complain that some internal tools assume you're serving a billion users when you just want to make a little webserver. But same with GCP.
> As a single founder, setting up Google Cloud, it's like they start out by assuming you're bigco
My impression of anything enterprise (big or small) related to Google is that they just don't care / value solving it.
Which is sad, because "How does an enterprise customer pay for X?" is a non-trivial and incredibly important UX problem.
They have great technical solutions, but these are hamstrung by a frankly amateur understanding of how companies (startups to Fortune 500s) need to sign up, pay for, and track things.
From an outside perspective, one of the biggest gaps seems to be that internal Google product teams don't have to dogfood the full GCP et al. project/org experience. They get prebuilt billing structures (or just get to avoid them with internal cross-billing).
---
If I could waive a magic wand, Google would appoint an "Enterprise Czar", reporting directly to Pichai, who is a non-technical, retired founder / CEO.
That person would have one job: try to sign up, run (their team), and budget strategic Google initiatives (like AI) as a blind external party.
They would then deliver continuous reports to Pichai about how hard / easy this is.
Because potential Google customers don't give a shit if it's this internal team or that internal team's responsibility for integrating New Product X into GCP billing.
They care that the experience is terrible, filled with friction, and often flat out doesn't work.
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Sergey's out spending $100 million to lobby against the billionaire tax in California. Lest his net worth shrink from roughly $250 billion to $237 billion. Can't become a pleb now! [0]
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/10/google-co-founder-sergey-b...
not that I'm intending to defend Sergey here but, if you could spend 0.04% of your net worth to protect 5% of your net worth (and probably all of your easy liquidity)... wouldn't you?
I think that argument should stop with advocacy for law. I have no problem with this when it's means playing optimally within the current laws, things like hiring world class tax attorneys. But if using your immense wealth to ensure the rules that everyone plays by favor you specifically, instead of the country/world, It feels like this is closer to bribing a judge than hiring a tax attorney.
I would normally agree with that, but in this particular case "everyone" is just over 200 individuals. And he could be opposing it on principle as well.
A one-off retroactive wealth tax is a rather questionable form of taxation even if (like myself) you are in favour of looking for ways to tax the super rich more effectively.
When I read about these one-off wealth taxes I find one thing really astonishing. The argument against wealth taxes in general is that people would change their behaviour, which would reduce the tax take over time. That's certainly true.
But then left wing economists believe that imposing it retroactively and calling it a "one-off" does not change people's behaviour. Technically, it cannot change their behaviour with respect to this specific taxation event.
But I find it utterly naive to believe that this sort of hit and run taxation will not change people's behaviour in other ways that would reduce tax revenues.
No one in their right mind would ever believe that a tax that brings in $100bn over 5 years will not have to be replaced by some other tax paid by the same group or by the somewhat less well off who decided to stay.
> And he could be opposing it on principle as well.
I fucking bet.
If my net worth were that high? No.
Folks need to remember that we're closer to being homeless than we are to being as rich as them. You don't need to defend billionaires.
Quantitatively, yes. Qualitatively, no.
Qualitatively I’m much closer to a homeless person in terms of my power to control other people.
We should stop calling it a wealth tax and start calling it an unearned power tax. That’s a far more apt term.
I meant in real practical terms, not higher concepts.
I am fine with not having a private island or a network of influential friends, but I am really really glad I’m not defecating in the street.
Those are things you can buy with a paltry eight figure net worth.
I’m talking about 13-15 figures. When you don’t have ‘influential friends’ but obedient servants who happen to be public officials.
> if you could spend 0.04% of your net worth to protect 5% of your net worth
If I was anywhere near being a billionaire I wouldn't. There would be much better things to spend my time and effort on. That's not even counting the fact that I would probably care about the ethical aspect too.
0.95x of an obscene amount of money I can't spend is still an obscene amount of money I can't spend. That 5% wouldn't make any discernible difference in my life.
They’ll be back for the less rich people too until no more rich people are dumb enough to stay. Look at CAHSR. There’s no end to how much money California politicians can spend.
There’s not a revenue problem in California. There’s a spending problem.
Not if I was that rich, no. Fundamentally Sergey does not have faith that an accountable government merits the money.
No. It's irrational at that level of wealth. He can make it back in a year. Billionaires very commonly see 20% returns a year.
I'm not in favor of the billionaire tax, there's better ways, but if the people want it he can just put his big boy pants on and fucking deal.
If you mean given my current net worth, then the question doesn't make sense.
If you mean a world where I had his net worth, then you're accusing me of being a sociopath.
FWIW I definitely did not not need to do anything like that to generate a key via AI Studio. It was like three clicks to get the free tier key, later on enabling billing was a few more plus typing in credit card info.
yeah, "enabling billing" is a whole other ordeal. Like it all makes sense, it's not that hard, it's just a lot of extra clicks where the competition doesn't require that. You can blow off this feedback as the user whining, but it's real friction and the competition doesn't have that, so users are going to go elsewhere if they can.
I signed up for AWS (SES) recently for the first time and find their whole thing confusing as heck too. Signed into the wrong region and they pretend they don't even know who I am.
It was 3 clicks because you knew where to look for.
A pet peeve of mine is that Google doesn't let you search all the options like Apple or Microsoft E.g., I have flashbacks to trying to turn off or on bells in Google Home. A simple search bar would help people trying find API keys, etc.
Don't forget your account getting flagged for review, so you get to wait an extra 24 hours for no reason.
This happened to me once when I was setting up some virtual servers for a startup.
I wanted a typical dev/qa/prod with medium specced boxes.
I was denied for quota, with an esoteric process for review.
I'd just made a case for deploying to GCP over AWD so got a bit of egg on my face. Went over and had it done on AWS in a few minutes.
A couple days later, the Google product team contacted me. I told them what happened.
It got escalated, and I ended up on a call with like 5 or 6 people from Google, some very senior. I told them what happened.
They made very concerned sounding noises and told me how this was a product failure on their part, how they'd get it corrected, etc... and they'd fixed my account so I could now make the machines. Of course, I was already deployed to AWS at that point.
That company grew and ended up with a pretty big cloud spend eventually. Google totally missed it.
I was at a new startup a few years later and decided to deploy to GCP.
Denied for quota.
Literally just built a custom Adsense dashboard based on not integrating with Google's APIs. Every couple days I export the 2 reports I need from their UI and save them to a folder; it's automated from there and integrates with my clients' website - thats good enough - even if its not real time its a small price to pay for not having to navigate (and maintain) Google's API madness. Like you said 8 different dashboards before you get what you need (and frontier LLMs cant help here), and even then you are forced to build some elaborate Oauth app instead of just getting a simple API key that you can paste in a .env file
expertise at navigating accidental complexity can easily be mistaken for engineering expertise.
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Personally I went to https://console.cloud.google.com since I already had some GCP projects. Then I searched for Gemini API Key. It brought me to https://console.cloud.google.com/agent-platform/studio/setti.... Then, there was a banner saying "Enable APIs to access full platform capabilities." Then, I did that, which took quite a while (minutes). Finally, I was able to see the way to create an API key.
The fact that there's two ways to get keys is also very confusing.
+1 GCP can be confusing - I totally get that.
Even if you have GCP projects, I'd still recommend the AI studio UI - easier to figure out. Also, you can easily see the free tier in AI studio and just use your API key from there.
Yes I will look into it now but there’s no cross reference from GCP, and why are there two ways? And why did the GCP way require all these APIs enabled while AI studio didn’t?
> And why did the GCP way require all these APIs enabled while AI studio didn’t?
Because whatever internal team owns AI Studio fought for approvals to do so and GCP didn't?
Luckily, an AI solves this.
But ironically my experience is that Codex/Claude navigate GCP better than Gemini.
> Enable APIs to access full platform capabilities
Isn’t this the insecure thing that gives all your Google API keys access to Gemini, even those that were intended to be semi public (eg maps API keys embedded in websites or apps)
You need to create a Google Cloud project to create an api key and when you try to create one you very often get error messages like:
“Failed to create project, The request is suspicious. Please try again” or “ You do not have permission to create a key in this project”. You can then navigate multiple screens in GCP to make it work but it’s a hassle compared to any other provider (OAI/Ant/OpenRouter or any of the Chinese labs).
I didn't have that issue back when I originally created my API keys a couple years ago. Just out of curiosity I switched to a different Google account that had never interacted with AI Studio and never used Google Cloud console.
It was literally two clicks, and didn't even leave the page: the dialog asked to create a project and type in a name, I did that, clicked submit and then it was selected as the default project. One more click and I had the free tier API key.
Not saying you didn't have that experience at the time, but personally I have had zero issues with AI Studio and consider it the most dead simple/fastest dev dashboard to get started compared to the others like OpenAI/Anthropic (thanks to Google's free tier that lets you skip billing setup annoyances just to play around with Gemini).
Despite what HN threads (that are also frequently confused and talking about GCP instead) portray as universal/widespread issues or the process being complex and time consuming somehow.
Last time I used the AI studio free tier it was limited to one or two requests, effectively useless. I think people are complaining its too hard to set up a paid API key (no reason you should make paying customers spend more than a few clicks and a minute of their time to pay you)
We have probably 10+ years old account with Google cloud etc. We recently had a production deployment, I went over to AI studio to get new keys and it kept failing saying "Failed to generate API key, The request is suspicious. Please try again" - It was through my standard browser, same geo-ip. And it just worked after 2 days.
> Can you help me understand how it is hard to get an API key from Google?
Using Google products in general is an effing nightmare as soon as you have to give them money.
The one thing you want in a business is to remove friction when people want to give you money, a concept Google has never been able to understand.
> Using Google products in general is an effing nightmare as soon as you have to give them money
Spending money via Google Pay on Android is extremely easy, Google does know how to accept customer's money (in the consumer space)
Google if you're reading this, it does not mean I do not want limits on spending
Maybe things have changed but it was a big mess trying to getting an API key from Google as an individual a few years ago. Way too much conflicting documentation.
Eventually I gave up and run a few hundred million tokens (edit a few billion) through openrouter.ai using Gemini Flash 1.5 to Flash 2.5
Every since price increases on Flash 3.0 I've stopped using Gemini, too expensive for basic classification, sentiment detection, ocr etc.
As other posters said Google assumes you are some bigcorp trying to use their products. The Vertex versus AI studio confusion did not help.
I tried to use Gemini for one of my projects a month ago. Immediately after signing up and paying for credits, I got an email saying, “Action required: your billing account {redacted} is past due or has invalid payment information.” I have no idea why it says this. My credit card on file works. My balance updated with a new amount from that card. 11 days later, my account was terminated. I still don’t understand what went wrong or how to fix it.
I do pay for OpenAI, Anthropic, and ElevenLabs keys.
Have you tried using the free tier in https://aistudio.google.com/api-keys? Sorry for your billing issues - these can be super annoying to resolve
it worked for me okay when I needed it for myself in my personal account. But when I tried setup this for a company I spent almost a day solving lot of small puzzles in GCE like how to tell CEO that he have to connect billing account created for other purposes (and he not even remember at time that it exist) to new project and all other things that others talking about.
I have a Google account that I had tied to a domain I originally purchased from google (when they had the .dev offerings), and now that it's been purchased by square space my ability to use AI through that account is in a bizarre state. Even my free gmail account has more AI offerings, and I'm not allowed to pay for improved AI offerings on my custom domain & google workspace account.
I know this is probably a pretty small edge case, but it is a bit frustrating. Any other provider lets you sign up with an email and give them a payment processor/card, but because google wants me to only use their unified workspace for signing up, I'm completely locked out now.
On top of being the hardest website to navigate, Google console a) doesn't have real time billing (!) b) doesn't allow you to set a budget limit.
Sorry but it's not worth waking up with a 100k$ bill, fix your platform first.
Oh it’s worse than that. There are places where you CAN set a limit. This seems great until you are at the center of a huge traffic spike because of good pr and so you try to change it to a larger number only to be told you need to wait 24 hours for the setting to change.
Biggest traffic day of the decade and our site was down because of google.
You prepay for tokens exactly like the OpenAI/Anthropic dev dashboards when using AI Studio, which the link above is pointing to not GCP, also there are project specific spend caps now.
https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/billing#spend-caps
You are right; last time I tried it I used the cloud console as I needed gemini with the places tool included. However:
"Experimental: The feature is experimental and limited in scope. You are subject to overages for around a 10 minute latency period."
Why in 2026 can't Google do a database lookup in real time? This is so ridiculous.
Spend caps can now be set https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-...
As someone who has been running Gemini models in production for a year, recently (last 2 months), I have been actively moving away from it.
The primary reason for me has been that Google autonomously decides to downgrade usage tiers and then upgrade them again - and does this incorrectly.
Over the last week itself, in the span of two days, our account for first downgraded and then upgraded. This is despite matching the criteria to remain at the tier we operate at throughout.
Google Support (when you finally get to a human) has accepted that these are potentially bugs, but the first time it happened, we were rate limited so severely for ~4 hours that I find it really difficult to continue trusting Google.
Simple question - can i use Gemini 3.7 flash with a subscription in my own harness and not in agy client ? You're from Google so the question.
By the way - I love Gemini's personality . it's phenomenal to work with
The reason i want my own harness - is the custom tools that i provide vs the low tier tools that come with the custom harnesses.
You'll would really benefit , if we could use Gemini in our own harness and not be forced to use it via agy . i've tried using gemini to circumvent - but not been successful.
If you see this - please reply here
GCP/vertex is a maze
Same experience. It took minutes to find the API key from the console.
Now following up with Google support team without luck to find the logs. Prompts send to the model and the responses including the thinking was available in the ai studio. But it’s unclear where to find the same in console.
To make matters worse there is vertex api and rebranded to Gemini something and making it very confusing.
That is easy but I’ve also found myself in account setup dashboards that were obviously geared toward enterprise trying to set up access to tinker with something AI related. It might have been TTS but it’s been a little while and I can’t quite remember.
The problem is that this doesn’t work for enterprise. The rate limits of that is super low. Then you need to migrate to Vertex and that is just a pain. Who ever thought of using JSON instead of an api key…
I even know the link existed but forgot what it was specifically and couldn’t remember what AI* property it was offered under and it took me a long time to figure it out.
I haven’t tried in about a year, but I could never do any meaningful work outside 1P Google apps (antigravity) due to such fast throttling.
I just asked Gemini how to do it and that's exactly what it sent me. Was up and running in a few minutes.
i use gemini api in the third-party platform like openrouter and evolink.ai , easier to get key and manage my bill
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I use LLMs rarely, and only for digging into subjects which I can't find enough information using search engines. I only tried Claude and Gemini, but Gemini both returns faster and higher quality information which I can use for more targeted digging myself.
Google being Google, their models tend to be better at finding, organizing and presenting information, from my experience.
Yep, I use Gemini for this too and it’s great - very fast and high quality.
I’d be very willing to try it out as an API, but it’s far too complicated to set up payment, and I don’t want to risk taking a wrong step and being locked out of other Google services. So Anthropic and Mistral get my money instead.
Sol on Cerebras is going to be expensive AF
Cerebras is an uncut whole wafer. Each wafer gets you 44GB SRAM (not a typo, SRAM, not DRAM/VRAM). A few years ago, leading process node wafer from tsmc is $20K/ea without guarantee on yield.
A single full wafer likely can run qwen3.6-27b alone. But won't be enough to run bigger models, which are pretty much all popular models.
Is it? I think waferscale might actually be cheaper per-token, it's just so many more tokens, and of course right now it's not a full buildout so the availability is limited as well. I'd imagine they'll be migrating to whichever inference method is least expensive, and I expect asics to be the ultimate answer.
I'm not familiar with economics of chips, but I presume the SRAM on the wafer is less dense than HBM so it might be eating into its cost efficiency?
Moving from either frontier intelligence or frontier latency to a single model that does both at the same time is potentially a game changer in certain industries. I can easily see e.g. hedge funds dropping tons of money on this, because it means they can now do the same thing as their competitors, but much faster. That's basically a license to print money.
I am not sure this is the way to make AI more cost effective for such customers. If they are able to tweak any model for their use case it would be way more reliable and also way cheaper. In my opinion generic LLMs in the future will be just for attention economy or maybe government contracts. Everyone else will be running fine tuned free weight models or licenced closed source models (self hosted or managed).
This was a widespread opinion a few years ago, but by now it is pretty much accepted that any LLM fine tune you build today based on the best available models will be beaten by a general purpose frontier LLM within a year.
What would a hedge fund want to do on this exactly? It’s too slow for hft and I’m not sure what they would be doing where ms matter but is not hft.
It's not like there are only two buckets:
1. HFT doing ass-simple arbitrage where only latency matters 2. More sophisticated slower trading taking in deeper signals
Those are two points along a continuum. If you are reacting to an earnings announcement by having an LLM read the earnings release and listen to the call, getting the results a few seconds earlier lets you get your trade in a few seconds earlier. Just because "not HFT" doesn't mean "completely latency insensitive".
Exactly that. Except that ultrafast delivers this level of intelligence an order of magnitude faster. So if your competitors automatically react to news articles or financial statements with a certain level of comprehension within minutes, you can now do so in seconds.
Except they all do, and the money flows to Cerebras :)
Eventually they will. But until these models become commonly available there is a significant first mover advantage.
There's a lot of trading that isn't proper "HFT", but where speed and latency still matter. Often you'll find this employed more as slippage reduction - i.e you're going to make the trade either way, but making it faster saves you a few bps.
I'm not sure what event-based traders are doing now, but back in the day NLP sentiment analysis was all the rage, so I'm assuming they've now incorporated LLMs too.
I like using 3.5-flash-lite for doing cheap PDF and Image data extraction stuff. I don't think there is a better bang / buck model right now (3.1 is cheaper but a lot worse).
5.6 Luna costs far less and benchmarks far better, have you compared for this task?
Uh snap it indeed is cheaper: $0.20 / $1.20 vs $0.30 / $2.50. Gemini is mostly good enough for what I do with it, but the cost savings are interesting. Gemini is still faster though.
Not sure how much the benchmarks can be trusted though: https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleGeminiAI/comments/1vbq5vf/com...
You can use fast mode for 2.5x faster and it’ll still be cheaper on output tokens
Probably cheaper to run a Mac Mini with VisionKit (private APIs if you need bounding rects).
The API key you are mentioning is just ridiculous. Onboarding your company or personal account is a trap. I ended up getting assigned to sales guy just to test their Vertex API because I used a company email.
Of course, we just used OpenRouter for testing and never touched a Gemini model anymore.
Depends on the definition of friction. If someone is in the Google ecosystem, why would they reach out of it.
I already use GCP and Google for work, and getting an API key was so annoying that even I couldn't be bothered after a while of looking around.
Maybe things there have improved some, but when I was looking it was a huge runaround.
Hmm. My company has an internal portal for generating Gemini API keys. I select a project from a drop down, enter a name, and press okay.
That may be evidence the built-in Google experience is difficult or confusing.
> but I just don't know what situation I'd reach for 3.7 Flash
You reach for it every time you do a Google search
> You reach for it every time you do a Google search
[my self-important Kagi shtick awakens, pokes at it's restraints]
It's much cheaper tho. Junie says Fable is 5-10x more than default model (Gemini 3 Flash Preview).
> especially given how hard it is to get an API key from them
What does this mean? Anybody can get an API key