Is Gemini Actually a Coding Model? Google DeepMind's Ivan Leo Answers

**Shane Thomas** (0:00)
If you were to do a prediction for the rest of the year, what's on your bingo card?

**Ivan Leo** (0:04)
I think we're going to be rolling so many more agents in day-to-day life. I think we're just going to see token consumption go up. My mom's asking me about OpenClaw now. It's really exciting to see a lot of people just start playing with models and feel the AGI, I guess.

**Abhi Aiyer** (0:19)
We have a guest, Ivan from DeepMind.

**Shane Thomas** (0:22)
Welcome to the show, dude.

**Ivan Leo** (0:23)
Hey, how's it going?

**Shane Thomas** (0:24)
Thanks for being here.

**Ivan Leo** (0:25)
No, I mean, thanks for having me. I think I've been a big fan of Mastra and what you guys are doing. I think it's become incredibly exciting, especially in the space of building agents. And I think TypeScript has just been a language that's just perfect for it. And so, yeah, really excited to be here.
Awesome.

**Shane Thomas** (0:39)
Now, I know you came with a schedule of things that you wanted to share today. And before we get into that, because that thing is dope, by the way, the list that we're going to get through, can you give the audience a little background about who you are? How did you get to DeepMind, where you're from, which is interesting?

**Ivan Leo** (0:55)
I started out with open source, actually. And so that was kind of how I started playing around with language models, with a Python, actually a Python package called Instructor, where I think back then the problem wasn't that it was difficult to build agents, it was that it was difficult to work with language models reliably. And so that was my first foray into language models, where I wanted to make it easy for people to basically be able to build applications on language models. And so I was a core contributor to a package called Instructor. Fast forward like a year after that, I joined a startup called Manus, where we were building knowledge agents that were basically automating a lot of this knowledge work. Let's say you're a venture capital, like VC investor, you're a P fund, you're a consultant, a lot of your job is trying to make sense of data, trying to understand like I get this question, I'm trying to invest in this company.
And so a lot of your job is trying to make sense of the information that's out there, pull it from related sources, put it to get a nice PowerPoints, or just at the end, create an interactive visualization. And so I was there from, I think, when they first moved to Singapore, and I was there all the way until they finally got acquired by Meta. And it was really exciting. I think I joined at a really great time. The team was great. Every night we were pushing like great features and we were pushing like state of the art. When I was kind of deciding whether or not to go to Meta, I was fortunate enough to get an offer from DeepMind to join the Developer Experience team. I ended up deciding to take that offer. And it's been really exciting since. I think my job is just to try to figure out how to make it easier for people to build on Gemini. It's a great model. And so that kind of is like the background of how I ended up all the way from Singapore to San Francisco.

**Shane Thomas** (2:30)
Welcome to the community.

**Ivan Leo** (2:31)
It's a nice place though. I've been very surprised by how friendly people are in San Francisco and how open and like I think people are just discussing very technical concepts and everyone's working on something very exciting.

**Shane Thomas** (2:42)
They're more friendly to you if you have credits to give too.

**Ivan Leo** (2:45)
Just letting you know.
We're looking on that. I think maybe we can do a Mastra and DeepMind hackathon. Oh, for sure?

**Abhi Aiyer** (2:53)
Yeah, we should do that for sure.

**Shane Thomas** (2:54)
So big event happened two weeks ago, IO. All the bells and whistles were out. Could you give us a little recap of that?

**Ivan Leo** (3:02)
IO is, if you're not familiar, it's Google's annual flagship conference where we announce all of the different product launches. For me, I think this was the first time I actually saw IO and being there in person and seeing the huge venue and scale that it is was just really mind-boggling. So you have everyone from Waymo to the guys doing Android to the guys who are doing the Genie models, and us who are working on the API and the models at DeepMind. It's just pretty incredible to see how far everyone's kind of pushing the boundaries.