Great question! Vercel's AI SDK and AI Gateway serve different but complementary purposes in building AI applications. Let me break down the key differences:
AI SDK
The AI SDK is a TypeScript toolkit designed for developers to build AI-powered applications 1. It's essentially a development framework that provides:
- Unified API for working with different AI models across frameworks like React, Next.js, Vue, Svelte, and Node.js 1
- Core functions like
generateText()andstreamText()for text generation 1 - UI hooks for building chat and generative user interfaces 1
- Standardized interface for integrating various AI providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) 1
Example usage:
import { generateText } from 'ai'
import { openai } from '@ai-sdk/openai'
const { text } = await generateText({
model: openai('gpt-4o'),
prompt: 'Why is the sky blue?',
})AI Gateway
The AI Gateway is a proxy service that acts as an intermediary between your application and AI providers 2. It's focused on infrastructure and management:
- Request routing to various AI providers through a unified API 2
- High reliability with automatic fallbacks if one provider fails 2
- Budget management and usage monitoring across providers 2
- Load balancing to distribute requests optimally 2
- BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) support for using your own provider API keys 2
Example usage:
import { generateText } from 'ai'
const result = await generateText({
model: 'xai/grok-3', // Routes through AI Gateway
prompt: 'Why is the sky blue?',
})Key Differences
| Aspect | AI SDK | AI Gateway |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Development toolkit for building AI apps | Infrastructure service for managing AI requests |
| Focus | Code structure, UI components, developer experience | Request routing, reliability, monitoring |
| Usage | Import functions and hooks in your code | Configure as a proxy service |
| Benefits | Standardized API, framework integration | High availability, cost management, observability |
How They Work Together
You can use both together! The AI SDK can route requests through the AI Gateway automatically when you specify models as strings (like 'xai/grok-3') instead of provider instances 2. This gives you the best of both worlds - clean development experience with robust infrastructure.
The AI Gateway is currently in Beta and provides observability insights including request metrics, latency, and cost tracking 3.
55d ago