
16 segments available
Google DeepMind’s new image model Nano Banana took the internet by storm. In this episode, we sit down with Principal Scientist Oliver Wang and Group Product Manager Nicole Brichtova to discuss how Nano Banana was created, why it’s so viral, and the future of image and video editing. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 02:00 The Origin of Nano Banana and How It Got Its Name 04:15 The “Wow” Moments and Viral Launch 06:20 Seeing Yourself in AI 08:40 How AI Is Changing Art and Creative Work 11:00 Control, Customization & Character Consistency 14:00 Building Interfaces for Artists and Everyday Users 17:10 AI in Education and Visual Learning 20:25 Multimodal AI and the Future of Creativity 24:10 2D vs 3D: The Debate Over World Models 27:20 The Challenge of Taste, Preference & Artistic Style 31:10 The Japan Phenomenon & Creative Communities 35:00 From Images to Video: The Next Frontier 41:00 Working With Artists and Designing With Intent 47:30 The Next Era of Image Models 53:50 Closing Thoughts Follow Oliver on X: https://x.com/oliver_wang2 Follow Nicole on X: https://x.com/nbrichtova Follow Guido on X: https://x.com/appenz Follow Yoko on X: https://x.com/stuffyokodraws Follow Justine on X: https://x.com/venturetwins Stay Updated: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends! Follow a16z on X: https://x.com/a16z Subscribe to a16z on Substack: https://a16z.substack.com/ Follow a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z Listen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYX Listen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711 Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
"These models are allowing creators to do um less tedious parts of the job, right? They can be more creative and they can spend, you know, 90% of their time being creative versus 90% of their time like..."
"conversational nature of it plus the visual quality of imagine. And I feel like that's maybe what resonates a lot with people. >> Wow. Amazing. Um, so I guess when you were testing out a model, as you..."
"like a really fun feature to use is when they tried it on themselves because it's it's kind of fun when you see it on another person, but it doesn't really resonate with people emotionally. It makes i..."
"spectrum, you might have these tasks like putting together a slide deck, right? I started out as a consultant. We talked about that at the beginning. Um, and you spend a lot of time on like very tedio..."
"a story and so before when you couldn't get the same character over and over it was very difficult and then I think second the like second thing I hear all the time from artists is like um they love b..."
"there's a lot of people that are building really compelling UIs like um and and and I think it's a you know we're Yeah, I think I think there's different ways it can be done. Um, I don't know. You hav..."
"doing this but they were too intimidated by the professional tools in the past and for them I do think that there's a space of like that you need more control than the chatbot gives you. Uh but you do..."
">> to try to see if we're getting better. >> I'm in general I'm very optimistic about AI for education. And you know part of the reason is I think that most of us are visual learners, >> right? So tha..."
"3D representations. There's a lot of advantages. For example, everything stays consistent all the time. >> Um now the main challenge is that we don't walk around with 3D capture devices in our pocket...."
"it's very hard to know like how good is the character consistency of a model and um is it good enough? Is it not good enough? Like you know I think there's there's still a lot of improvement we can ma..."
"things where we looked at, okay, the model's good at XY Z, it's not as good at this, but we still think it's okay to release and it will still be an exciting thing for people to play with. >> If you l..."
">> Um and so you know in cases where you need to have your font or you want to change the text or you want to move things around just like with control points um it could be useful to have um kind of ..."
"um I'm sure you've had it's it's been insane. And it's so funny like I now half of my X feed is these really heavy Nano Banana users in Japan who have created like Chrome extensions called there's one..."
"on the team who are just like very creative. Um we have a team um who just works really closely with us on models that we're developing and then they just like push the boundary. They'll do like crazy..."
"And I think >> we still need artists. >> We still need artists. And I think artists will be able to also recognize when when people have actually like put a lot of control and intent >> and still not ..."