Gemini's Next Frontier: 2.0 Flash, Flash Lite Strategy & Real-Time APIs with Logan K from Google Deepmind

**Logan Kilpatrick** (0:00)
We sort of released the experimental first iteration of Gemini 2 Flash back in December. Today, we brought Gemini 2 Flash, an updated version of it, into production so that developers can actually continue to build with it. We announced pricing, 10 cents per million input tokens, 40 cents per million output tokens, which is, I think, a huge accomplishment for us to pull that off. We're gonna have the world's best coding model at Google. And I still believe this deeply, and I think like Pro is going to be that model, and a bunch of the reasoning work that we're doing is going to be that model that continues to push the frontier for us. The world needs a platform in which it's hosting all of the sort of publicly available benchmarks and sort of leaderboards and stuff like that. I find it incredibly difficult to just like navigate and get a snapshot of like, how good is this model? There's like 20 random benchmarks here and 50 random ones here. They're all split out over the place, and it's just like hard to keep track as a developer.

**Nathan Labenz** (0:55)
Logan Kilpatrick from Google DeepMind, product manager of the Gemini API and AI Studio. Welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Logan Kilpatrick** (1:03)
Thank you for having me, Nathan. I'm excited. I'm hopeful that I'm getting close to the record for the most times on your podcast.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:09)
I appreciate you for always. I think this might be setting the record at four if my count is correct. So yes, congratulations. That's a rare air and well deserved. So it's launch day. We'll get to everything that you've launched, and what we should be thinking about building with it. Quick little detour though, before we get there, you're now part of DeepMind. So Google obviously is a vast company and is continuing to, I don't know, align, restructure, streamline itself to focus more and more on AI. What's the story from the inside on what it's like to be at DeepMind now specifically?

**Logan Kilpatrick** (1:49)
Yeah, I'm super excited about this. So we've been, I joined Google 10 or 11 months ago. Literally from day one, it's been a deep collaboration with DeepMind. DeepMind has gone through all these evolutions over the last few years, transitioning from an organization doing fundamental research to actually productionizing models. And then within the last three months with the Gemini app moving over, and then AI Studio and the Gemini API is now actually an organization that end-to-end does the research, creates models, and then actually brings them to products inside of Google. And I think that's been a shift for them. But from my personal vantage point, I think this is the thing that makes the most sense. Being really close to research, and we already were really close to research through this collaboration we've had, but we're moving as much friction as possible for us to bring the researchers who actually know how to bring, in many cases, get the most capabilities out of the models. Bringing those two things together makes a lot of sense, and it's going to be a ton of fun. So as an external person who doesn't care about Google reorgs, which is most of the world, the thing that you'll hopefully see is an acceleration of model progress, but also an acceleration of product progress because we bring these two teams together.

**Nathan Labenz** (3:00)
Well, it sure seems from my vantage point on the outside that everything is accelerating, and we've had previews of some of the stuff that is now going general availability today over the last few months. And of course, there's been just one advance after another from DeepMind and others over the last few months. Looking back a little bit, what would you say are the customer success stories and or just coolest apps that you have seen come online that have been built with the Gemini API in recent time?

**Logan Kilpatrick** (3:32)
Yeah, I think the thing that I'm most excited about, and it also feels like we have the biggest opportunity here still, is around all these text to app creation softwares. There's a bunch of examples of these, like Bolt.new just went live, I think, yesterday with Gemini support. Cursor has Gemini support now and is using 2 Flash. Hopefully, we'll see others like Lovable and V0, etc. have that support as well. If you look at just the economics of running those products, it's extremely cost-intensive, especially as the number of people who know that you can actually do that use case today, if you put in a text prompt and get a basically working app slash website for free, essentially, is a very small number of people. It feels like that's this new frontier use case slash product paradigm that I think is going to be picked up across all the big players are going to do this. But I think also there's going to be a ton of startup activity in this. How do you just build domain-specific software for people without those people actually having to know how to code? I'm really excited about that use case and I think we have a lot more model progress to still do to become the world's best model at doing coding. But I think even for 2 Flash and 2 Pro from where we were six months ago, it's just an incredible amount of progress. I think trying to keep pushing on progress in the context of Flash without increasing the price in any dramatic way, I think has been the biggest win for us.