Once I finally got mostly set up for that, with billing and everything, it said it's only available for a limited number of customers, with a "request access" link to a google form with further links (to enable https://aiplatform.googleapis.com/) which 404.
Google seems to be desperately trying to show that they’re still relevant in AI, but they always end up with half-assed demos and presentations of products that don’t exist yet.
Isn't "half assed" a fairly accurate description of basically every google product since gmail and Android (and arguably that's been a rolling dumpster fire)
Even calendaring was something that took ages for them to get right. For something like a decade you couldn't move an event from one calendar to another on Android - only via the destop web view.
Google went from being an innovative company to a web version of IBM...a giant lumbering dinosaur that can't get out of its own way, and everyone kinda needs but also deeply loathes
They may have had the occasional advantage over iOS for a brief period 5-6 years ago. Nowadays they clearly lag behind Apple on everything and even their Pixel line does a half-assed copy/paste of the latest iPhone features (or introduces features which are shiny but have some sort of downside or require cloud processing to work).
Android's advantage has always been that everyone else gets to play. And it's good that we have that. But they aren't exactly the beacon of innovation they think they are or claim to be in marketing copy.
Especially in regards to Android, feature parity is just not that high on my wishlist. It makes calls, apps run on it, happy days. It's like knowing my car has running gear parity with another brand, when most of us are just using them to drive to work.
Weird, just tried in my terminal and it works fine. My account definitely has no special permissions, I've never requested any, I've probably spent less than $100 total on it (and that almost entirely on domain names).
What a shitshow.