You might then think, "I’ll use Claude via Vertex since I already have billing set up in Google Cloud." However, in the Asia-Pacific region, it turns out you can’t sign up for Claude via Vertex.
Meanwhile, DeepSeek is offering reliable performance through OpenRouter, and it’s free. It’s baffling that a tech giant like Google can’t seem to deliver the same level of reliability.
venkii•5mo ago
My first thought would be, re:
>It’s baffling that a tech giant like Google can’t seem to deliver the same level of reliability
It’s actually not that baffling to me! Shipping simple features gets harder and harder as scale, esp as the features must interact well with more and more existing features + get through bureaucracy.
For example, the regions bit you mention: Anthropic/DeepSeek can just pool all their regions together into a single API and mostly vibe it. But since Google already offers their regular compute by region, it’d be a little weird to not do that for LLMs only.
GCP probably just has a lot of complexity due to being enterprise-oriented, and unfortunately this carries over. Unencumbered startups get to start from a blank state though.