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This week on Unsupervised Learning, Jacob sits down with Nicole Brichtova and Oliver Wang, the Google researchers behind "Nano Banana" - the breakthrough AI image model that achieved unprecedented character consistency and took over social media.

The conversation covers how their model fits into creative workflows, why we're still in the early innings of image AI development despite impressive current capabilities, and how image and video generation are converging toward unified models. They also share honest perspectives on current limitations, safety approaches, and why the expectation of going from prompt to production-ready content is fundamentally overhyped.

(0:00) Intro
(1:42) Early Nano Banana Use Cases and Character Consistency
(3:05) Popular Features and User Requests
(3:54) Future Frontiers in Image Models
(5:26) Personalization and Aesthetic Models
(7:39) Model Success and User Engagement
(10:59) Product Design for Different Users
(19:30) Advanced Use Cases and Future Workflows
(23:14) Editing Workflows and Chatbots
(25:14) Google's Image Model Applications
(27:12) Milestones in Image Generation
(29:30) MidJourney's Success
(30:54) Future of Image Models
(33:55) Image Models vs. Video Models
(36:35) Quickfire

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint