Oliver Wang is a Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind working on the Nano Banana model. He discusses whether future frontier AI models must natively integrate visual modalities alongside language.
“A hundred percent. I definitely think so. The future for these AI models that I'm most excited by is where they are tools for people to accomplish more things. Like, I think if you imagine a future where you have these agentic models that just talk to each other and do all the work, then it becomes a little bit less necessary that there's like this visual mode of communication. But as long as there's people in the loop and as long as the kind of the motivation for the task they're solving comes from people, I think it makes total sense that, that visual modality is going to be really critical for any of these AI agents going forward.”
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Wang: A single AI model will never satisfy all use cases
“I definitely don't think that, that the broad amount of use cases will be fully satisfied by one model at any point. So I think that there will always be a diversity of models. Some, like I'll give you an example, but some, you know, we could optimize for inst…”
Oliver WangOct 28, 2025▶ 14:55Google DeepMind Developers: How Nano Banana Was Made
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“Like to me, I think that the most important thing for art is intent. And so the, what is generated from these models is, is a tool to allow people to create art.”
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“I think we can solve almost all the problems, if not all the problems, working on the projection of the three-D world directly, and letting the models learn the latent world representations.”
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“Every model can cherry pick images that look perfect. So like now I think the real question is like how expressible is this model and what's the worst image you would get given what you're trying to do? So I think by raising the quality of the worst image We r…”
Oliver WangOct 28, 2025▶ 51:10Google DeepMind Developers: How Nano Banana Was Made
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Oliver Wang: Professional creatives will always adopt state-of-the-art AI tools
“The high end, and the professionals, and the creatives, like, they'll always use state-of-the-art tools, and this is like another tool in the tool belt for people to make cool things.”
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