A product discussed on Latent Space.

⚡️ Google's Open AI Strategy — Omar Sanseviero, Google DeepMind
May 24, 2026 · 29:59
Omar Sanseviero, Google DeepMind's Head of Developer Experience, explains Gemma 4's novel architecture with per-layer embeddings that enable effective parameter offloading: only 2B of 5B parameters need GPU memory, ideal for on-device inference on phones and Raspberry Pis. The model matches 1.5-year-old state-of-the-art in most areas, with Gemini Nano integrated into Pixel and Samsung phones. Gemma 4 supports multimodal input (audio, images, short video) but not audio output or combined audio-video prompts. Sanseviero notes fine-tuning is declining as out-of-box capabilities improve, but remains relevant for specialized domains like healthcare. He contrasts dense (31B) and MoE (27B) variants, highlighting MoE's inference speed but fine-tuning challenges. The team is expanding globally, with Kaggle joining DeepMind to create community-driven benchmarks for model evaluation.

Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash Thinking: the new SOTA models for the agentic era
Feb 28, 2025 · 28:21
Logan Kilpatrick, Google AI Studio product lead, returns to discuss Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash Thinking, the new models that balance frontier capabilities with cost efficiency for the agentic era. He explains the pricing strategy: Flash at 10 cents per million tokens (simplified from tiered pricing), Flash Lite preserving the 7.5-cent narrative for low cost, and Pro pushing the frontier. Flash Thinking, co-led by Noam Shazeer and Jack Rae, scales inference-time compute and already shows rapid improvements, with base model advances coupling with RL-based reasoning. Swyx reports that Gemini Flash outperforms o3-mini on long-context summarization, calling it a 'reporting model.' The multimodal live API enables real-time voice and vision interactions, and a memory layer mimicking Astra is in development. Grounding with Search as a Tool is also highlighted for agentic search use cases.
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