Readit NewsHe seemed like a good guy and got the sense that he was destined to do something big
If you can ignore Vertex most of the complaints here are solved - the non-Vertex APIs have easy to use API keys, a great debugging tool (https://aistudio.google.com), a well documented HTTP API and good client libraries too.
I actually use their HTTP API directly (with the ijson streaming JSON parser for Python) and the code is reasonably straight-forward: https://github.com/simonw/llm-gemini/blob/61a97766ff0873936a...
You have to be very careful when searching (using Google, haha) that you don't accidentally end up in the Vertext documentation though.
Worth noting that Gemini does now have an OpenAI-compatible API endpoint which makes it very easy to switch apps that use an OpenAI client library over to backing against Gemini instead: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/openai
Anthropic have the same feature now as well: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/api/openai-sdk
Just stick with AI Studio and the free developer AI along with it; you will be much much happier.
I just wanted to make sure you noticed that this is linking to an accessible blog post that's trying to communicate a research result to a non-technical audience?
The actual research result is covered in two papers which you can find here:
- Methods paper: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/met...
- Paper applying this method to case studies in Claude 3.5 Haiku: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio...
These papers are jointly 150 pages and are quite technically dense, so it's very understandable that most commenters here are focusing on the non-technical blog post. But I just wanted to make sure that you were aware of the papers, given your feedback.
I'm not sure how many folks these days would consider him an "oracle". He clearly did fabulously well with some early Internet investments, but he also was famous for folly after folly of overpriced investments in the 2010s (the Softbank "Vision Funds").
I'd be curious if there is a simple accounting list of Softbank's major investments ranked from biggest winners to biggest losers. I guess it pretty much highlights the dynamics of the VC business model - you only need a few giant winners to offset the boatload of losers. In Softbank's case, I'm guessing their biggest winners are Yahoo Japan (which was the dominate site in Japan for a long time, and long after the US Yahoo fell into irrelevance) and Alibaba, which saw their early $20 million investment balloon into billions.
But did Softbank have any winners from their 2010s spending spree (along the time where they shoveled good money after bad into WeWork)?
The opposite situation is with AMD which are avoiding the mistakes of Google.
My hope though is that AMD doesn’t start to compete with cloud service providers, e.g. by introducing their own cloud.