Google has recently made its Gemini models available to developers, following its earlier announcement and launch of the Bard chatbot experience. This marks a significant step for the search giant, as it brings the power and capabilities of Gemini to the hands of developers everywhere.
Among the new and updated services introduced today is AI Studio, previously known as MakerSuite. Acting as a web-based gateway into the larger Gemini ecosystem, AI Studio allows developers to access the Gemini Pro and soon, the Gemini Ultra model. One can easily develop prompts and chatbots based on Gemini, and even obtain API keys for use in their applications.
It’s worth noting that the free version of AI Studio offers a generous 60 requests per second, giving developers the freedom to experiment and iterate without any limitations. This quota may even be sufficient for some production-level applications which may not receive a high volume of requests.
However, there is a tradeoff for using the free tier: Google’s reviewers can view the input and output of the API and web app in order to improve its quality. To address privacy concerns, Google emphasizes that this data is de-identified from the user’s Google Account and API key.
The latest version of AI Studio is a major upgrade from its previous iteration as Makersuite/AI Studio. It now supports both Gemini Pro and Gemini Pro Vision, offering developers the ability to work with both text and imagery.
Josh Woodward, Google’s VP for Google Labs, highlights the main goal of AI Studio: “We’ve designed it really to be the fastest way to build with Gemini. We really want to invite developers to come play with it. It is the first version and we’ve got a lot of fine-tuning we’re already doing now for future updates, too, but we’re trying to design it in a way where people can just get in and really start building with it.”
Using the web interface of AI Studio, developers can select their desired models, adjust the temperature to control the output’s creative range, and provide examples to guide the tone and style of the output. There are also options to tune the model’s safety settings, including turning them off entirely.
Furthermore, AI Studio offers different workflows for creating freeform, structured, and chat prompts, catering to different use cases and preferences.
According to Banks, the VP and GM for Google’s Developer X teams and head of developer relations, AI Studio serves as a gateway to Google’s wider AI ecosystem, particularly Vertex AI, the enterprise-ready generative AI developer platform.
“With the idea of ‘growing with Google’, you can build something with AI Studio, run it, deploy it, and let people use it with the generous free tier. But we also provide a set of SDKs that enable developers to run and build apps with Gemini Pro on various platforms, from the backend with support for Node.js and Python, to mobile with support for Java, Kotlin, and Swift, and to web with JavaScript,” Banks explains.
The transition from AI Studio to Vertex AI is designed to be seamless, as stated by Woodward: “The first version we showed people, they said: ‘I love how easy it is to prompt. Now I want to go to code.’ And there was sort of this cliff that we had to fill in.”
In addition, Banks reveals that Google plans to introduce Gemini to the Chrome Dev Tools and Firebase mobile development platform in early 2022.
With the rapid development of generative AI, it’s impossible to predict the full potential and applications of these tools. However, Banks and Woodward assure that AI Studio will continue to evolve and serve as an accessible onramp for developers of all skill levels to explore and unleash the capabilities of Gemini.
“I hope that AI Studio, in some ways, won’t just be seen as a prompting tool or something that only developers go to, but it’s actually, in some ways, a developer and creativity tool, where people can come up with ideas for working with these models and all the capabilities that will come out over the next year or so,” Woodward concludes.
