Transcription
I've been thinking about Nano Banana Pro and how it's changing how we think about what's solvable and what's possible with AI. I don't want to show you Nano Banana Pro today. I want to show you something that was made possible because of the advances Nano Banana Pro made and help you start to think about the kinds of applications for intelligence that are going to be possible in 2026 because we made this one breakthrough.
So, here's the mental model. LLMs are jagged, intelligent surfaces, which frankly people are too. We're very, very good at some things. My brain can do the differential equations in real time that are needed for me to catch a baseball with my hand or a cricket ball. I can do that without thinking about it. As long as I practice, my brain can figure out which face goes with who with a shocking degree of accuracy because we evolved to be face-to-face people. My brain is actually not as good at formal mathematics. If I had to sit down with differential equations and a piece of paper, I would need some training, thinking, and experience to do that on paper without a calculator.
The point is that they're jagged. We all have different shapes to our jagged intelligence. And traditionally in careers, a lot of the art of it has been taking your unique jagged intelligence and sticking it into a predefined role. Sort of like sticking a special snowflake shape into a square or a round hole for work and saying, "This is what you're going to do." It may not quite fit your strengths, but it's close enough and you can do the job.
So, LLMs are changing that because it turns out LLMs are also jagged, but they're jagged in very different ways than we are. I did my Nano Banana Pro review and I discovered Nano Banana Pro can accurately summarize an entire earnings report, but if you ask it to make a children's alphabet, it cannot do that yet. And so what we need to realize is that each advance we make along these critical axes in language, in image, in video, in three-dimensional modeling and others unlocks tremendous numbers of downstream businesses that can build off of that breakthrough. Basically, every time the AI gets a little bit less jagged and starts to solve a piece of that puzzle a little bit better, we unlock a tremendous amount of value.
And Nano Banana Pro did that because even if it can't make a children's alphabet, it turns out it can make a pretty darn good PowerPoint slide, it can do a lot of the image work we need to a degree of dness that we just call good and we don't have to touch it when it comes to business images. And so infographics, PowerPoint slides, marketing images, largely a solved problem in December and largely all of them were unsolved in June. That's how fast we're moving. And when you move that fast, you get really cool new businesses that unlock.
And the one I want to talk about today is called capsules. They don't know I'm talking about this. This will be a surprise. Capsules is a new kind of storytelling medium that recognizes that we are visual creatures. That we are not text creatures. That even though chat GPT has hit a billion users, we are still textriven creatures, images creatures at heart. And it's easier for us to see than to read. And so despite the success of Ched GPT, I think Nano Banana Pro and the imaged driven revolution that will follow is going to be even bigger. And one reason why that may be true is shown in the growth charts that we're seeing for Nano Banana Pro. Gemini using Nano Banana Pro is growing even faster to a billion users than Chad GPT ever did. It is taking Chad GPT's place as the fastest growing app to a billion users. And I think it's largely off of the image capabilities of Nano Banana Pro.
So what is what is capsules? Capsules is a storytelling medium that combines text with generative images that reflect the mood of the text and that is scrollable. And so what it feels like is a little bit like unraveling a parchment that shows you a moving picture and helps you get a sense of the mood of the text as you scan. And it's a very light, easy, thoughtful way to read. It works for travel logs. It works for reflective pitches. It works for a whole host of stories that would previously have been locked in long Twitter threads or previously locked on an age ago, like a version of Reddit or even back in the day MySpace. This is a way of telling stories that pop, that gets your attention. And yes, I'm going to show you one. I think it's a really cool idea.
And one of the things that's interesting about capsules is it is clear that they are unleashing a new generative technology in ways that allow the community to tell stories that were not previously possible. And so this is underlining the larger point for me, which is that we can't see all of the downstream implications, but when a new foundational technology piece hits, when when images are solved the way they were with Nano Banana Pro, we then get to a point where a host of downstream flywheels can get started because we got that one core piece solved. So without further ado, I'm going to show you capsules.
This is a capsule. It might look like just a classic 2010s web page with a nice scroll effect, but what you're seeing is that you're actually generating live and animating an image that goes with the concept. In this case, the writer is pitching a new startup driven by the idea of a canary trigger. And so, the story is all about how canary triggers worked during the Cold War. What it means to have a dead man switch where you have something happen if you are absent. how that has been difficult to do in the age of the internet due to technical obstacles and how now with the blockchain and with AI they can code up and build a true canary switch that allows journalists to share information with relevant authorities if they are ever uh taken hostage or in other ways interfered with. So this is something where a startup is basically saying we built a technology that enables journalists to be protected and tell the truth. And this gives us a way to get that story across that connects their own personal background in East Germany during the cold war with the concept now in the age of the internet that they're trying to get across. And so the Canary story just sort of is told visually. There's this nice animation effect that's being generated by AI. They're basically giving us a pitch deck.
And look, it's not my job to tell you whether this is a good pitch or a bad pitch. It's my job to say this would not be possible as a pitch without Nano Banana Pro a month ago and without a startup named Capsule that built over the top of Nano Banana Pro and is now enabling us to tell these kinds of stories. That is what is interesting. And so I don't care really if these guys get funded or not. What I care about is that we understand the pattern. When you get a new foundational technology that fills in one of the jagged troughs in AI intelligence, the jagged gaps in AI intelligence, and it's a little bit better now, you unlock a tremendous amount of value. Tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars in value because all kinds of downstream businesses like Capsule and like this new startup building on top of Capsule immediately spin up. You're already two generations in on your business lineage. You have Nano Banana Pro. You have Capsule built on top of Nano Banana Pro to tell stories. And now yet a third business that is using this brand new technology in a brand new startup to tell their own brand new story. That is what transformational change looks like. That is what it looks like to be in the middle of the AI revolution. That's how fast things are moving. Remember, Nano Banana Pro is barely a month old and we're already three lineages down. That is how fast AI startups are moving to take advantage of these skills.
And so my challenge to you in 2026 is one, you should be building with Nano Banana Pro, but but two, look for the other spaces where LLMs have jagged gaps and look for what it looks like to know they're closed and move quickly. I'll give you some examples. I think robotic graspiness and robotic coordination is an area where we're very close to a big breakthrough. Another example, I think always on agents are very close to a big breakthrough. I think continual learning is close to a big breakthrough. I think memory is close to a big breakthrough. I think proactivity is close to a big breakthrough. Think about those. What does it look like to know that those are solved enough to build in those spaces? And how do you start to think about your product needing that kind of capability and get ready to build for it so that you know that you can build into that space before other people do in 2026 once whatever the correct product release is the Nano Banana Pro equivalent is released because that's what you're looking for, right? You're looking for some signal from the model makers. We've solved continual learning or memory is solved enough or there's an always on agent that works enough and now you can build into that space. And if you look at the building blocks, you can start to see when we're close.
So with Nano Banana Pro, you could see that a lot of the work on images was very, very close. Realistic images were there. Text was there. All we needed was something that put it all together. And that's what we got with Nano Banana. That's what I want to encourage you to look at. Look at the spaces where we have almost everything but not quite. and then plan your product roadmap accordingly because these businesses are going to unfold fast. If if we're three lineages deep on Nano Banana Pro in a month, how many more businesses will we unlock in 2026? It's really exciting stuff. So that's Capsule. I hope that gives you a sense of how quickly AI businesses move and of how important it is to jump in once key LLM gaps are solved by a foundational technology shift like Nano Banana Pro. Cheers.