I'm glad I upvoted. Your perspective and questions are valid, no matter the depth of conversation. You'd be surprised what fresh questions can do for a topic.
They are very much not a part of the initiative. Their involvement is and will be non-existent. Unless of course, you want their lay staff to make some noise?
Piggybacking on deeply integrated information and connectivity within society that was marketed and adopted under the guise of trust and an ethos of not being evil is pathetic.
Build, train, develop and maintain an AI for military if needed. When a government is scared of individuals they've clearly lost their edge.
If you believe marketing hype, then that's exactly what it is... Hype.
If you speak to industry professionals and retain a healthy scepticism, you don't have to look far to find people that absolutely do not believe the marketing.
Quite frankly I like that advances in say quantum computing are publically announced. The hype around what that means for society and our view of the universe is probably where you want to put on that reserved scepticism hat.
Similarly smart glasses were and are a thing, but society is rightly apprehensive about the impact, so the hype has dropped off.
Why would they encourage more resource use, increasing their cost?
Gemini should have had it's own API key separate from their traditionally public facing API IDs (which they call keys) and API keys should default to being tightly scoped to their use case rather than being unrestricted.
Who cares if you have three API keys for three services.
Quite frankly putting any API information in things like url params or client side code just doesn't sit right with me. It breaks the norm in a way that could be, and is now security concern.
Objectively, it gets even worse in regions where Google voice isn't available. The only options seem to be online SMS portals where a relatively small set of numbers are shared across many users.
If anyone knows of a good, secure VoIP provider outside of the US I'd be keen to hear about it.
Can confirm this internal joke/complaint. In hindsight, hearing it my first week or so should have been a strong red flag toward future frustrations, and the current state of some products.