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Getting Started with Google AI Studio🔗︎

Google was a bit later than expected with widely available GenAI. They've rapidly gained momentum, and have several compelling models that lend themselves to interesting use cases. Here's a recent example of what I mean: Video Scraping.

Here are my notes for getting started with the Google AI Studio.

Pro Tip - Create a New Google Account

Google leverages Drive for prompt library, file storage, and chat history. Anthropic, and OpenAI will also authticate to a google drive for access to files. It's helpful to have a google account just for AI things. Create one here.

Setup🔗︎

Developers should use Google AI Studio. This is analogous to the OpenAI Playground. There's a Python SDK (GH) available that may be installed with:

pip install -q -U google-generativeai

When you generate an API key, you'll be prompted to add it to a project. There's no concept of a default project like OpenAI / Anthropic. As far as I can tell, what Google means by "project" here is a Google Cloud Project. Similar to a Resource Group in Azure. The Google AI Studio will automatically spin a project up for you if one does not exist, and subsequently enable the Gemini API within that project. You can view this by visiting the Google Cloud Console. For me, it created a project called "Gemini API" in an Organization named "No organization". It also enabled the Gemini API within the project.

Example Script

The Gemini API Quickstart will walk you through creating the following script:

import google.generativeai as genai
from dotenv import load_dotenv
from rich import print
import os

load_dotenv()

API_KEY = os.getenv('API_KEY')

genai.configure(api_key=os.environ["API_KEY"])

model = genai.GenerativeModel("gemini-1.5-flash")
response = model.generate_content("Write a story about a magic backpack.")

print(response.text)

People to Follow🔗︎

The level of exposure the community has to the people building this tooling is remarkable. Here are several I follow:

They are iterating incredibly fast, and are very open to community feedback. Here's a great example of a discussion between Logan and Pieter.

Other Notes🔗︎

Gemini's free tier for developers is the most generous of any AI provider. This opens the door to some interesting use cases. I'm using the platform quite a bit... and time permitting, hope to write about the gems I find along the way.

  1. Raiza has since left google to start her own company. ↩