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Last week, Google announced its family of Gemini models and added them to its Bard chatbot. Today, it’s launching a variety of new and updated services for developers. One of these services is AI Studio, formerly MakerSuite.
AI Studio is a web-based tool for developers that opens up the Gemini ecosystem, starting with Gemini Pro and then Gemini Ultra next year. The service lets developers quickly create prompts and Gemini-based chatbots, then get API keys to use them in their apps or code to work on in a more powerful IDE.
There is a relatively generous free quota of up to 60 requests per second, which should be enough to quickly iterate on ideas without restrictions and possibly power some lesser-used production applications.
For developers using the free tier (which is pretty much everyone for now, as Google only plans to launch a paid version early next year, likely to coincide with the GA launch of the Gemini Ultra model), Google’s reviewers can see API and web app input and output to “improve product quality.” However, Google says this data is de-identified from the user’s Google account and API key.
Makersuite/AI Studio feels more substantial than before. It will support Gemini Pro and the Gemini Pro Vision model, allowing developers to work with text and imagery (but not images).
“We’ve designed it really to be the fastest way to build with Gemini,” Google Labs VP Josh Woodward told me. “We want developers to play with it. It’s the first version, and we’re fine-tuning it for future updates, but we’re trying to make it so people can just start building with it.
Developers can choose models, adjust temperature to control output creativity, and provide examples to guide tone and style in the web interface. The model’s safety settings can be adjusted. In MakerSuite, you could disable all guardrails by telling the system not to block any responses, but in AI Studio, the lowest setting is “block few.”
Create freeform, structured, and chat prompts using different workflows.
Woodward said the team tried to make AI Studio’s free tier not feel like a trial or gated product. Developers can publish or use AI Studio applications through the API or Google’s SDKs immediately if the free tier’s rate limits are sufficient.
The VP and GM for Google’s Developer X teams and head of developer relations, Jeanine Banks, also stressed that AI Studio is a gateway to Google’s AI ecosystem, particularly Vertex AI, its enterprise-ready generative AI developer platform.
“With ‘growing with Google,’ you can build something, run it, deploy it, let people use it, and have a generous free tier. But we’re also shipping a whole set of SDKs that enable developers to run and build apps with Gemini Pro that can run pretty much everywhere, from the back-end with Node.js and Python, to mobile with Java, Kotlin, and Swift, and to web with JavaScript,” she said.
She said the team wants the AI Studio-Vertex transition to be smooth. Woodward said user feedback drove strong SDK support. We showed the first version, and people said, ‘I love how easy it is to prompt. I want to code now. We had to fill this cliff, he said.
Banks said Google will add Gemini to Chrome Dev Tools and Firebase early next year as part of the ecosystem.
The speed at which generative AI is developing makes it hard to predict what developers will use these tools for next, but Banks and Woodward stressed that Google plans to build AI Studio as an easy onramp for developers of all skill levels.
“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 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 said.
