Last night, as an experiment, I added support for Google's Vertex AI Gemini API to Mobibot, the #mobitopia IRC channel bot. I used Guillaume's very concise guide. You can try it out by joining the #mobitopia channel on irc.libera.chat and typing something like:

mobibot: gemini write a koltin class to append two files together

Yes, the typo is intentional.

Mobibot also supports ChatGPT, so you can easily compare the results.

The implementation was pretty straight forward using the vertexai library, although I found the ChatGPT API easier to use overall. Gemini seems to be quite slow and overly verbose, but the quality of the answers feels superior. Gemini has no real-time data, so asking things like: the number of days until Christmas, yields some pretty funny results.

I have no doubts speed, etc. will improve over time. I thought most articles about Gemini taking over ChatGPT were kind of fluff pieces, but there might something to it.