Inside Google’s AI Studio with Logan Kilpatrick

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
Hey, everyone. Every week, I sit down with investor and writer, Byrne Hobart on Turpentine's show, The Riff.
Byrne is the rare individual who can synthesize information from tech, finance, and history into fluid narratives that simultaneously capture the big picture and deliver fresh insight. Byrne is revered in Silicon Valley, and you can get an hour with him each week. To see for yourself how Byrne's thinking can upgrade yours, go check out The Riff.

**Nathan Labenz** (0:23)
Hello, and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, I'm excited to once again be speaking with Logan Kilpatrick, formerly Developer Relations Lead at OpenAI and currently Product Manager at Google, where he's responsible for Google's playground-like AI Studio product.
Logan has become one of my favorite people in the AI space. He is extremely hardworking, very earnest, and always inclined to be helpful. After what was very clearly a super intense period for him leading up to Google IO., he managed to fit this recording in before dinner with his family, which I very much appreciated. We covered a lot of ground in just over an hour, including Logan's first impressions of Google's culture, how hard the team at Google is working from top to bottom, and how Google is balancing the need to share information across teams internally while also protecting its most valuable intellectual property. We discussed how quickly Google DeepMind is producing research advances, how much of a challenge it is for Google product teams to keep up, and how important that makes application developers to Google's overall AI deployment strategy.
We also got into the incredible capabilities of Google's Gemini 1.5 flash model, which significantly outperforms the original GPT-4 on head-to-head user comparisons, while offering 100x longer context window at just 1% to 2% of the price per token. Really an incredible advance in just a year. The distinction between the AI Studio, Gemini API, and Google's Vertex products, and a look at the roadmap, including fine-tuning for Flash, which, depending on what else happens between now and then, would make Flash the most powerful model available for fine-tuning anywhere in the world.
Logan also gave me a pointer on how few of the AI rumors that circulate online are actually true. And finally, we discussed the state of competition in AI, both between frontier labs and between platforms like Google and the startups building on their APIs.
I always appreciate Logan's candid insider perspective, and I think this conversation is really self-recommending for anyone who's building AI-powered applications or simply interested in the state of play at the world's most important AI companies.
As a quick reminder, I am considering starting a super-niche Cognitive Revolution jobs board. When I mentioned this in the recent Scouting Report episode, I got a half a dozen resumes in, which was awesome. Now I'm wondering if I skimmed everything off the top or if there's still a lot more interest out there. If you'd be interested in an AI engineer or an AI advisor role, responsible for helping medium-sized businesses apply AI in very practical but often very idiosyncratic ways, please do be in touch. And if you're part of a business that needs that sort of help, feel free to ping me about that as well. As always, we appreciate it when you share the show with friends, and once again, we humbly ask for your reviews on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just a comment on YouTube. One of the most common comments that we get on our YouTube channel, actually, is simply that we deserve more subscribers and views. So thank you in advance for helping us to spread the word. With that, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Google's Logan Kilpatrick. Logan Kilpatrick, now of Google. Welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Logan Kilpatrick** (3:52)
Thank you. I appreciate it.

**Nathan Labenz** (3:54)
Lots of cover. I was just out at Google IO at your invitation, and thank you for that.
I think the race is officially on, that's safe to say. I want to just take you through a little bit of your experience with Google. Obviously, you've had one of the few people on planet Earth that has seen both of the 1A or 1A and 1B AI leaders from the inside, so just to get your perspective on that.
Then, honestly, I just want to do a pretty down-the-fairway run-through of all the stuff that was launched at IO., all the stuff that you're excited about, help developers get oriented toward the platform. As you well know, there's some complexity issues there historically that I think you're working to help overcome, and then I hear there's some cool stuff, maybe more stuff, coming soon too, so maybe we can preview that a little bit at the end if we can time it just right.