I've just found myself using OpenRouter if we need Google models for a project, it's worth the extra 5% just not to have to deal with the utter disaster that is their product offering.
This is the wrong interpretation of the oxcaml project. If you look at the features and work on it, it's primarily performance or parallelism safety features.
The latter going much further than most mainstream languages.
And even when it does copy other products, it seems to be doing a terrible job of them.
Google's AI offering is a complete nightmare to use. Three different APIs, at least two different subscriptions, documentation that uses them interchangeably.
For Gemini's API it's often much simpler to actually pay OpenRouter the 5% surchargeto BYOK than deal with it all.
I still can't use my Google AI Pro account with gemini-cli..
There are some significant innovations behind behind v2 and v3 like multi-headed latent attention, their many MoE improvements and multi-token prediction.