10 AI Projects to Learn Gemini 3 Nano Banana and Opus 4.5

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, 10 AI projects through which you can learn all of these amazing new models that have dropped on us over the last couple of weeks. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Blitzi, Rovo and Robots and Pencils. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. And to learn about sponsoring the show or pretty much anything else about the show, you can check out aidailybrief.ai. In some cases, like on the sponsorship, there will also be emails you can point to. In any case, again, it is aidailybrief.ai. And now my friends, let's get practical. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. If you are in America, right now, you are probably experiencing the hangover, either literal or the turkey hangover, of a big Thanksgiving or friendsgiving. And while for a very short moment, I considered not having episodes, as this is a weekend for friends and family, and touching grass and hanging out and all that good holiday stuff. But what I decided to do instead was get a little bit more fun and practical all at the same time.
We have been on an absolute tear of incredible new models. In the last two weeks, we have gotten GPT-51, followed by 5.1 Codex Pro and 5.1 Pro, Gemini 3, Nano Banana 2, Opus 4.5, and even Grok 4.1. And as I said the other day, the biggest takeaway from all of this is that there are just a whole bunch of things that you can do now that you either couldn't do at all before, or you really couldn't do well. So what we're going to do today is provide a little bit of weekend homework. For those of you who are catching some of this off time to go dig into all these new tools and toys. So we're going to talk about 10 AI projects you can do to learn these new models and better understand their capabilities. Now first up, this actually isn't a new model, but if you haven't done it yet, I'm about to speed your life up significantly. One of the most embarrassing parts of the modern computing experience, and certainly the Mac OS and iOS experience, is how bad the voice text is. If you ever tried to speak into your iPhone, you know you spend basically as much time fixing all the errors as you would have just writing it in the first place. WhisperFlow, W-I-S-P-R-F-L-O-WAI, fixes that pretty significantly. You can set this up on your phone or on your computer, and so for example, when I am doing anything on my desktop that I record all these podcasts on, pretty much at this point instead of typing, I'm pressing Ctrl and Option for it to start listening to the microphone and just dictating things. I'm talking at something like 140 words a minute and it even does a good job when I'm slightly rambly and repeat thoughts of cleaning things up. So I highly suggest as you dig into all these projects that you download WhisperFlow and try out Dictation and start integrating speech as opposed to just typing, my guess is that you will very quickly find there are certain types of tasks that you will just not want to type for anymore. So technically this is one, but it's kind of just a bonus. Go install Whisper. Next up, moving to these actual new models that are released, we're going to start with Nano Banana. Now Nano Banana isn't just great because of the photorealism of its image generation or even its ability to listen to instructions. It's great because it opens up this whole new set of visual modalities that just weren't possible before. If you have been anywhere on social media since Gemini 3 released, you've probably seen some new infographic that would have been totally impossible before. This one, for example, is from Eric Sun, who says one-shot infographic for acquired FM's 3.5 hour Trader Joe's episode. Basically, Nano Banana was able to take a podcast, summarize it, and then turn it into an infographic. And what's important here is that there are actually two very different and very important things going on. The first is, of course, that Nano Banana can handle text in a way that is completely different than anything we've ever had. Any other model before couldn't even come close to this level of information density. It just was not possible at all. But secondly, because it's integrated with Gemini 3, it's got built-in reasoning. So, my strong assumption is that Eric probably didn't even have to say, first summarize this and then make an infographic, because it is integrated natively with Gemini 3's reasoning, it was just able to figure that all out. I played around with this at the end of last week as well, turning each of the first four episodes of the week into infographics. I even then animated one with VO 3.1 to take it to another level. So, what should you do? My suggestion, to keep it really simple, would be to take some work report, either a project summary, maybe a new proposal, drop it into Gemini 3, or NotebookLM, which we'll talk about in just a few minutes, and ask it to produce an infographic on that basis. But I will say that while the first couple of weeks are just people being impressed that this is a capability that AI has now, I do think very quickly, you're going to have a little bit of a slop sense when it comes to some of these infographics, and there will be a whole bunch of human taste involved in nudging the model in directions that makes the visual presentation, not just the sort of default Nano Banana setting, and also doesn't try to compress everything, but maybe really gets at the information that is most impactful. Basically, as with anything, I think that there very quickly will be a huge difference between general Nano Banana infographics and the really good ones, and I think basically as people figure out better strategies, like this one here, which immediately feels really different, that's where a lot of the opportunity lies. Still, don't be afraid to just try things out to start, you can always go back and edit later. Relatedly, I think that you should try out the combination of Gemini 3, and Nano Banana for data visualization. We are working on a new product behind the scenes called AI Maturity Maps. And while I don't want to get too much into exactly what that is yet, part of the goal is to create a very quick visual benchmark that organizations can use to see how they stack up relative to others when it comes to AI and agent adoption. I have spent the last few days digging deep with Gemini 3, with Nano Banana integrated, to move back and forth between the reasoning and exploration piece that Gemini 3 comes with, and the visualization that Nano Banana makes available. And even more than the infographics, this is where it feels to me like you really see the ultimate power of how these things come together into a whole that's greater than the sum of the parts. So a couple ideas for you at home to do data visualization, assuming that you don't have a product that you're trying to design. One kind of advanced one that I was thinking about that seems like it could be really interesting is to try to create a visualization that compares how you wanted to spend time in a week to how you actually did. So the simplest version of this idea that I could think of was to at the beginning of a week write down your major goals and then maybe even some of your minor goals. I was thinking from a professional perspective, but there's no reason it has to be, it could be personal as well. Then at the end of the week, give Gemini 3 slash Nano Banana access to your calendar, which you can either do by connecting it directly or if you want to go analogous, taking a screenshot of it and ask it to visualize the difference between what your goals were and what you actually spent time on. Now, obviously this isn't perfect because a calendar doesn't get at all of the things that you spent time on, so if you can give it other sources of information and context, all the better. But like I said, it's just one idea to think about how to experiment with the new data visualization capabilities of these models. An even simpler version that came from Zara Zhang, she used Nano Banana inside of NotebookLM to turn a resume into a slide deck. One of the specific requests was to ask it to visualize competencies in Venn diagrams. She said this is a great way to understand your personal positioning. And I actually think that in the context of a resume, this Venn diagram idea is a pretty cool idea for data visualization. Once again, as you can see, this takes advantage of not just Nano Banana's image generation capabilities, but also the integrated reasoning capabilities of Gemini 3 Next up, this one is going to seem so silly and basic, but is, I think, incredibly valuable. Just go try and edit an image with Nano Banana as compared to other image generation tools. You can do this in a couple different ways. You can take an image that you already have and ask to swap something out or change something. Or you can generate an image with this specifically in mind. One of the things that made Nano Banana 1 really powerful was the fact that you could be so much more precise in your editing, which opened up all sorts of commercial and business types of use cases that weren't possible before. That capability has extended to another level in Nano Banana 2, and just because it's really simple doesn't mean you should be ignoring it. In fact, you should make sure that you've got mastery of that one before you do anything else. If you listened to yesterday's episode about 10 holiday-themed kids' AI activities, I've got a couple of examples of where I wanted it to change certain aspects of some image that it generated for me while keeping the overall. So for example, for the Gratitude podcast idea, this is the image that it produced, and while it's great, I wanted it to be more Thanksgiving-y themed. I also wanted it to be less photorealistic and more cartoony. Now, I did not give this some super sophisticated prompt. I said make it cartoony and Thanksgiving-themed, and this is what I got back. Now, maybe in this case, I would have been fine having a totally new generation, but I liked the setup of the first one, and this was able to change the style in terms of the illustration and the Thanksgiving-theming without losing what I liked about the image in the first place. Another example for designing a superhero card for a pet waiting to be adopted. Loved the setup, but wanted it to be holiday-themed because that was the theme of the episode, and it turned it into this. Tasteful little tree, lights over here, garland on the mantle, snowing outside. I'm telling you, go try to edit an image. Once you see what is possible, I would bet that it will find its way into your workflow much more frequently.