230 - Google's New AI Tool Is Breaking the Internet (Nano Banana Review) with Elizabeth Knopf

0:00You're saying I could have just had this Talk to Gemini live on and it would have been looking at what I was trying to build and like give me real time feedback? Absolutely. That's insane. If it could generate from this one episode, then I'm going to hang this call up and end early because I'm done for a week. This is incredible. Why the F didn't I know? This is insane. Why the freak wouldn't I have ever done this? This is amazing.

0:23Okay, Liz, I am excited to talk to you today because you are going to show me how to actually use some amazing tools. but the things we're going to talk about today are the things that are currently taking the AI world by storm. The first one is Nano Banana, which is the model that Google just released. And the second one is you're going to actually show us with CloudCode how you replaced one of your apps and created your own app using CloudCode, natural language. You're not a coder, you're not a developer, but you're going to show us how we can do that ourselves. So first question, what the freak is Nano Banana?

0:53I keep seeing this crap all over the internet. I'm like, I don't know what this is. So you know how like a couple of weeks ago we were talking about how Google sucks at marketing. Well, I think they were listening to Herb Hot because someone stepped up their game and they did a great job finally releasing a product called Nano Banana. And all that is, is their Gemini Flash 2.5 image model. So it's just another image model, but it's actually a pretty awesome image model. I found this Reddit thread I'm going to show to you. And these are some examples of Nano Banana, of what they did. So this is, here's a picture of Ronaldo.

1:26He's drinking a water bottle and they photoshopped a coca-cola they also photoshopped a jersey on them the face looks photoshopped to me just because i see them next to each other but pretty cool here's one that i think's nuts like they took this picture on the left it's two guys in the middle of the day with the toronto skyline behind them and then they photoshopped that too at night it's literally the same guys in the same picture you wouldn't have known that incredible editing oh this guy took a picture in front of his house it looks like he's in like nova scotia and then they change his clothes and the lighting and it looks like he's in a flea market in Morocco or something like that.

2:00So really, really good image generation. My question is like, what are people using this for? Is it just like a novelty trick? A couple of key challenges that have come up with a lot of the image generation models. So first off, it's just like replacing things and doing simple edits can be, were a little bit hard to do. And even with like chat GPTs in comparison, you know, you would say like make this, you know, change this one element. And sometimes it would work and then sometimes it wouldn't. And same with Google's previous models. And so now it has just become much more precise with specific edits and iteration of those edits.

2:39So changing the shirt, changing the product, like it actually is much more accurate in terms of how it takes whatever you're prompting it to change and making those changes. And I would say Adobe was still sort of the leader and you're saying Photoshopping, but like literally they were probably still leading the way in some of that editing versus again, going to one of these image models to do your editing. But now Nano Banana really sort of advanced the ball in terms of doing that. The second key feature, and I think is the more exciting and really big deal is what's called visual memory. So this is essentially where you can have from one image to the next, it persists as the same person, same object, same thing.

3:22And that has been the biggest flaw in image generation because you would see these little even ads or short ads and there would be a person, but they'd slightly look different with different bone structure or something in the next cut. And so now persistence has actually been improved so dramatically. And that's because they came up with some interesting techniques while they're building the model, which we can talk about in a second but those are really the oh that's really cool yeah okay so so if i was starting to use these image generating models but that was always a problem right it's like cool i generated this cool logo but how do i get it to stay the same logo across multiple iterations whereas this is like well now you can do that you can you can keep the same person in the same image or the same logo whatever it stays persistent here's my question to you we used to talk about multimodal and maybe this is just me because i'm a caveman but we used to talk about multimodal models where you're like, oh, I can upload an image and then I could upload text and I could upload a video and I could upload, I'm trying to think of what the other mode would be, but those are all three different data types.

4:29And in the past it was only text, but now you can upload some images and videos getting there. However, my perception of multimodal has actually changed a little bit. I think of multimodal now as I have an LLM that I use for synthesizing data. I have an AI image generator that I can use to create whatever, logos, et cetera. I can even get these. They're not LLMs. They're SLMs, small language models that are specific use cases that are maybe they're healthcare, maybe they're tech related, et cetera. Or maybe there's a deep research function. So it's like those are actually different modes of AI.

5:07And I think Google has done a really good job of creating this studio. It kind of incorporates a lot of these different modes. but people don't really use it or know about it. And you were just telling me about Google AI Lab. I can't remember exactly what it's called. What is it? Okay, so since they have so many different, yeah, locations and properties. They're terrible. And it's bad. Aistudio.google.com. So it's Google AI Studio is the name. One of the locations you can access Nano Banana or of course you can go straight to Gemini and access Nano Banana there too. Google AI Studio has now started incorporating in that model into being able to build out little apps and like other tools with this new model.

5:49So that's, I think, pretty exciting. And we'll dive in here in a second just to see what's basically possible. Okay, so this is it. I'm in Google's AI studio. So AI studio.google.com. First of all, I don't know, it must have been two months ago or so, but you showed me a version of this. Yes. And it was overwhelming. This chat interface is clean. I mean, it looks like the OpenAI chat interface. I don't get instant anxiety looking at it. Okay. So on the left side, I have chat, which looks the same as OpenAI, but then I have stream. What is stream? So stream is actually a pretty cool thing. This is where you can basically use your web camera or share your screen.

6:30So like if you are debugging something, if you want to learn something, if you want Google to watch a video with you and give you feedback or see you do something live and talk with you, it is actually doing that and capturing it in real time. So this is like, no way. Yeah, people are sitting on this feature. It is pretty incredible. I use it a lot for just debugging. And when I'm like doing something or like following instructions, I'm like, what am I getting wrong? Or like, look at my screen or so I don't have to take a gazillion screenshot, I'll do that. Or I've tried to make a YouTube video and having it sort of walk through it with me.

7:08So there's a lot of different cool things you can do with this feature that again, is like totally slept on. I did all these interviews with people. I wanted to look at all the interviews to be able to pull out information that maybe I'm not seeing, but there was a problem cleaning the data. So I had it all stored in Google and one of the coolest tools google apps script i was writing a script and i was like claude can you help me write this script and so this is me just like going back and forth it's writing the script and then every time it would i'll show it to you so this was the script you see over here and i would copy and paste it into actually google apps script and it would help me create it but every time that it would screw up i had to do this i had to take a screenshot of the execution log and then i would copy it and I would just literally paste it and it was like, oh, this error was because of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

8:00And then it gave me a fix. You're saying I could have just had this on? Like I could have just had this talk to Gemini live on and it would have been looking at what I was trying to build and like give me real-time feedback? Absolutely. Yes. That's insane. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, I will say that I have had in the past where like, again, I love Claude. So sometimes I think Claude is better at feedback because again, they're using the Gemini chat model. So it depends on your opinion there, but Gemini has been getting a lot better, but absolutely, absolutely. Can you do that? Go to that in a second.

8:35Then we'll come back to the apps in a second. So yeah. So like, again, if people haven't been using VO, pretty spectacular for like videos, they have also other sorts of media now you can produce. So whether it's like speech generation, doing audio. Like, again, you can start doing a lot of cool stuff in here. And one of the things also that I think is worth noting on Nano Banana that I also think is cool related to that sort of persistence element is like you could do step-by-step guides. So I haven't yet tried it for software, but I have tried it for like fitness. Like show me a step-by-step guide with images of like how to properly lift weights or do an exercise.

9:14And it will take with the same person going through each of those steps. So you can just, again, get very creative and imaginative on like using those step-by-step guides. Obviously they have a recipe one here. So I think that's a pretty cool feature. And as you can go in here, like they, they have a bunch of cool examples and templates that you can be inspired by different camera angles. That's insane. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So now the cool place that again, people don't even know about. And this is like a helpful way for beginners who, again, are a little bit intimidated to get started in building apps.

9:48So if you go to build, this is similar to some of the other LLMs that will have sort of like little mini apps examples. They used to call them gems, which was just really like confusing. Now they, I don't know, just are calling them apps, I guess, where I don't know if there's even a different terminology, so whatever. But basically they have little starter apps and examples, some of which have incorporated in Nano Banana already. And there's others that have sort of showcased some of the real power of what Google and Gemini can do, which again is really on this sort of like video multimedia components that I would say, you know, the other models each sort of have elements of, but I really think that Google is excelling and doubling down on that capability of both like animation, video, audio, and streaming.

10:41Is this kind of an answer to cloud code? Sort of. Sort of. I would say they're very different in terms of like the workflow, but everybody's trying to build out some kind of coding app because everyone sees like personal software is what's happening. That is what is being sort of cultivated through LLMs as really, I would say, the biggest area of maybe annihilation or augmentation from what's happening. So, you know, everyone's building apps. And so you can do that now with ChatGPT, with Anthropic, with Cloud Code, with Brock. You can all sort of build within the browser. So then still, again, you can build it from here in the browser.

11:24there's still a couple steps to like get it into production. But Google has like that full work stream of getting from a little mini app into production, whereas some of the other guys like don't have the same kind of infrastructure that Google has. It's not as slow. So it's probably more similar to a replet or lovable than it is to cloud code. Sort of, sort of. I would say it's again, it's hard. You're so nice. You're like, yeah, I mean, you're like, yeah, kind of, kind Kind of. But like, again, they all have like, you can start prompting to build something. And then again, to go to that sort of next mile is a little bit more challenging.

11:59But this I would say is like still keeping very simple apps. I would say Cloud Code is still sort of the best in going like, in the same environment interface, you know, from idea to production and building out sort of infrastructure. Like again, I'd say Gemini is doing well. But again, there's something about their interface that I'm just not as like thrilled about. So I think it's personal preference, but you can access a lot of these tools here and test it out and see if you like them. Cause again, I think it's just a preference thing. Yeah. I literally just put this prompt, build me a game.

12:31I can play with my kids. It's a history trivia game with rounds of questions that is tailored to everyone's age. The app should keep score. It's been running for 75 seconds and I can see it real time building this out. So like in this sense, it reminds me of lovable and then I'm like watching it build real time. Boom, there it is. And now I have basically an MVP to test around with. So I could say Nick, age 40. Then I'm going to add another player. We're going to say Liz, age 29. Oh, thank you. And then we're going to start the game and we're playing. It's generating the questions. This is me.

13:11Which Roman emperor famously appointed his favorite horse? incititus to the position of consul or at least threatened to in display of content for the roman senate i have no idea i'm gonna say nero because i just know he was a nutcase okay caligula all right liz here's your question it's generating for you which explorer is often credited with the first circumnavigation oh come on of the earth despite dying halfway through the journey was that magellan christopher no it was magellan he died yeah he died in the philippines i think is where he died. This is freaking cool. I just built this. It's awesome.

13:50And so if you want to go back in a second, I'll show you because I think like this is cool. Again, like Cloud Artifacts can do this, like Chachi Boutique can do this, Grot can do this. But I think there's a couple of pieces with the nano banana element and some of the features that they have that's pretty cool. All right. So if you just go down to like the one for showcase, so just scroll. I just wanted to highlight a couple of cool things. So keep going. Okay, so number one, maps. People don't talk about map making or leveraging maps. So map at Explorer or there was like an MCP map thing, whichever one you want to do.

14:23Like you can incorporate in map elements. So I started talking about kids. I started doing like an exploration on the Google Maps for my kids game. Like, you know, something like Carmen Sandiego meets something else. And so Maps is just like, you know, that's embedded and native to Google's stack. And so you can start doing cool things with Maps or, you know, maybe it is more on the business side, logistics and scheduling. Or, you know, there's a lot of different use cases that I just I think Maps is sort of a cool, unique use case that other folks don't have as ease of integration. Of course, you can like integrate Maps into everything else.

15:02But again, it's, you know, Google's sort of core function. Oh, this would be so cool. I could do a total game with my kids. Yeah. Like Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, which they honestly just found recently. I could say, take me somewhere ancient. And I know my oldest son's going to be like, let's go Gobekli Tepe. And then all of a sudden we could just go to YouTube. I could build this out and be like, take me somewhere cool and then give me the top three YouTube videos to link to just because it's in the Google ecosystem. That's awesome. Yep. All right. So let's go to another cool feature they have. Okay.

15:32So this one I haven't got to work perfectly, but it's called video analyzer. And then we'll highlight a couple other. Where is it? To scroll down, down, down, down, down, uh, video, video analyzer. So this is like pretty cool. So we all sort of want to understand, like, you know, you can get a transcript from a video, but like, if we're doing this podcast, we want to say like, where, where's our body language bad? Or I don't know, some, some other thing, or what is happening in this video and you can literally in their little app here add in a video i can drag and drop you can add yeah so this you have to have a local file for i had edited this the other day where you could just put it in a youtube url and it would download the file so you could iterate this little let me see if i can get let me see if i can get a video i made this video a couple of months ago of people hanging christmas lights with some music on it so i'm going to take that and i'm going to add it here and we're going to see what that does.

16:27It's processing the video. Now, do I need to tell it something or is it just processing it? So let's actually see because the way I was doing it was different the last time. So I have no idea. Let me be surprised. I'm so nervous. Explore this video via audiovisual captions, paragraph, key moments, table, haiku, chart, custom. Let's do, what do you think we do? Haiku or chart? Let's do a chart. Let's see. I don't know what it'll do. chart of importance type of custom prompt. I want to see a chart of the total number of light bulbs. I have no idea if that will work. I just thought that'd be interesting to try.

17:12Yeah. Because they're hanging light bulbs. You can start imagining to like, okay, you can actually ingest. Wow. That's pretty cool. count that of course but yeah here's this is the video and you can see this guy's just setting up all the light bulbs i mean i believe it i'm not going to go count it but i believe it how cool is that that's freaking cool it is pretty cool so again like now you can start like ingesting video as a medium and doing more than just you know getting a transcript which I just think is pretty cool. Yeah, that's awesome. All right. So a couple other things to highlight that are just related.

17:57We don't need to do the full demo of them, but just, you know, throwing them out there. So if you just keep on going down, there's like a video learning one. So similar, basically you can put in video to learning app. So you can basically put in a video and it'll generate like an app related to the video. I've tried it a couple of times.

18:19It tutorial type videos. But again, these are just like cool ideas that if you polish up, you can build your own little apps to do cool things with or like use this as a lead magnet. I want to try something. I want to try. Okay. Let's go to my YouTube channel. Oh gosh, that sounds so douchey. I'm sorry. Let's go to my channel. Let's pick a video that would be really cool to turn into a lead magnet. So, okay. So I've had a video that I put out of somebody who walked me through the process of building out a directory. So we've talked about directories before. They're like super high right now because people are like, oh, I could build a directory with AI.

18:58I don't have to do all the manual work, blah, blah, blah. Anyways, that was a really popular episode. People really loved it. And now I'm taking the link. I'm dropping it in here. I'm really curious to see what it generates for me because if it could generate from this one episode of like a how-to video how to build a a directory then i'm gonna hang this call up and end early because we're done i'm done for the week i'm hope it works so that it wasn't working well for me the other day even though i'm like this is one of the apps yeah so we'll see we'll see if it does but we'll see fingers crossed okay well that's that's spinning up we'll see where that goes.

19:38While that's loading, I just feel like Google even still, Hey, I don't know if you remember this, but when we started this podcast, we entered into a social contract. I would spend time, energy, and money producing this podcast, interviewing these individuals and giving you insights into how to build, buy, start, grow your business. And you would like subscribe and leave me five-star review. Now out of that, we both get to talk to really cool people and hear really cool insights. We both get a ton of value, but I just want to help you keep your word. So would you do me a favor? Will you go leave a five-star review for me on Apple or Spotify?

20:12It would really help. And if you want, even share this with a friend. What we just went through, the AI studio is incredible. Why do more people not talk about that? Are we just spoiled? I don't know. I don't know. Cause it's like, I think the thing about cloud code versus like Google's suite and even everybody else's like coding suite, there's still friction in terms of like when you start to how you get to production versus I think with clod code because it's in the terminal. It's like even though you're still dealing with this weird black box interface, you can go through the full process and then when you want to visualize it, it just sort of like pops up on your browser versus the other ones.

20:55It's like you have to then figure out how to get it to view it. Sometimes there's a previewer, then sometimes you have to like connect it with like either Vercel or go with like Vertex or there's like still steps. And at every point, every point in something you have to change or do, you lose people. And even though it's so easy to do this stuff now, like friction is still friction and people just, you know, stop if it gets like a little bit hard. Understandably so. Yeah. Okay. So that, that learning code app, I got an error. You can see the vision and I think with some iteration, you can get there.

21:30I just think with this AI studio that Google has, man, for like novices like me, I can have the video running while it's watching me go through stuff. It can tell me in real time what things I'm messing up. I can create apps. It can show me the apps. It takes the good of lovable replet and it takes Claude, which helps me debug things. And then it has a good image generator. Oh, and then I can integrate my YouTube videos. I can integrate my Google Sheets. Like that's one thing that bugs the crap out of me. And maybe you can help me fix it. When I ask Claude to parse data, and then it's like, sure, go ahead, just copy this and paste it.

22:07I'm like, no, just give me the CSV. Such a pain in the butt. Whereas Google can obviously just do that with Google Sheets, but money on the table. Yeah. No, and it's interesting because right now people that are watching and paying attention, Like this is a great arbitrage opportunity for any of this stuff. Like, again, people don't know about Google AI Studios. So you can literally take that code, find a good URL that has some good traffic already and just put it up like minimal changes. Obviously, you need to do a couple of things. But, you know, if people get ad revenue or whatever for a free tool.

22:40So I'm working on a couple of those. So we'll see how it goes. But I mean, right now is a good little arbitrage until everybody's doing it. That is such a freaking good point. It's an amazing arbitrage because people, it used to be the software development was only for a select few who had gone through a ton of school, understood how to code. Now we can do it with natural language and something like Google's AI studio. It's a built out suite. It has all the tools that you might ever possibly need. You have no coding experience and you just told me you built an app that replaced one of your apps recently.

23:10What was that? Okay. So let me share my screen and show you what I've been working on. So I used to pay for an RSS feed tool and that basically aggregates. Tell me what that is. Oh, sorry. Okay. So that basically is listening to websites, keywords, different social media sources, and it's aggregating all that information into a feed so that you can basically see everything. It had organizational collections and groups and just different ways to parse information so that you could just see it in one spot versus going to a gazillion different sites or having to read through a million newsletters or whatever.

23:48So I basically was like, I'm sick of paying for this. It was not that expensive. So probably not the best use of my time for something to build. But at the same time, it was a good starting tool as I'm learning cloud code and sort of sharpening my skills. And so can you show me what, like, what did it look like before? Sure. Let me see if I still have access to. Okay. Let me see. Sorry. I'm just like, I'm trying to understand. okay so this is like the tool i used to be paying so this is rss.app yeah and it would bring in all the things that you were interested in yeah so it's not really showing how it used to show just because i've canceled this on the free version here but like let's do the opening night so basically it would be a feed so like it's still better than what i built but like for my purposes this is great so i was paying 20 a month for this and what was it what was it going out and scraping was it going to like twitter was it going yeah so all of these youtube or like how was it yep so it was scraping specific sites so like xai news i was going to oh okay i inputted all these i had my own you know twitter feed here just ai sites like different peoples who twitter accounts i had like this is incredible yeah why the f didn't i know this is insane well the cheaper one that is worth doing and it's actually free now it used to you have to pay a little bit or i use api I use APIs, so that's why I end up paying for everything.

25:14Seedly is a little bit more inexpensive. This is like$10 a month for more feeds. But yeah, you can put in different sources and just have your own little feed here. I mean, I go to Twitter because it's like, I've kind of curated my feed so that I see the stuff or I'll go to their search and see what's trending, et cetera. Why the freak wouldn't I have ever done this? This is amazing. Exactly. Of course. Because there's specific information I want. I want to know the AI updates. I want to know the SMB updates and I want to know the tech updates. That's pretty much it. I don't really care about the politics anymore.

25:46And I have to freaking filter through Elon posting, you know, half naked 10 year old girls on the feed. Like Elon, settle the freak down. Anyways, this would be an amazing way to cultivate my like my own. Sorry. OK. Yeah. So so you had an app for that for your own feed and you decided I'm going to build my own. Yeah. And again, this is just something to cut my teeth on because I'm just like, you know, this is like annoying that I'm paying 10,$20 a month. Like, again, I'm paying a lot more in other subscriptions, but I was just like, easy tool to build. Let me see if I can do it. Ingesting information is useful for a lot of different use cases and apps that I have on my backlog here.