In today’s episode, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at the AI tools I use and why I often prefer developer interfaces over consumer-friendly options. You’ll discover the hidden “router” in consumer AI systems that can limit your control and potentially impact the quality of your results. I’ll also explain why paying more for a developer interface can be a worthwhile investment for certain use cases. If you’re ready to level up your AI game, this episode is for you!
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Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for watching the video.
Christopher Penn: In today’s episode, let’s talk about which AI tools to use — or more accurately, which AI tools I use — because I use very different tools than a lot of other folks do.
Let me show you, I’m going to show you a couple of different examples here. Let me go ahead and share my screen. If you’re listening to this, you’ll want to head over to the YouTube channel. I’m going to pull up the consumer interface to Google Gemini, and I’m going to pull up the developer interface to Google Gemini. These two things are both part of the Gemini ecosystem. However, they’re very, very different.
So the consumer interface, which we’re looking at here as Gemini, it has a prompt, it has a warning that, “Hey, human beings will review this,” etc. And you put your prompts in, and it just goes and it does what you want it to do.
The developer interface within AI Studio has a lot more stuff. So there are — there’s a model selector here, which lets you choose which version of Gemini you want to use. I’m currently using 1.5 Pro. It has a temperature setting, which allows you to tell the model, “Hey, be less creative, or more creative.” It has safety settings that you can turn up or down, and even advanced settings, like, “Hey, like — hey, I want you to write code. I want you to return your responses in a different format.” And you can change things like the stopping sequence.
Why would you use this tool that’s way more complicated and has more buttons and more stuff than this tool, which is really simple — add the prompt, add your documents and go? For someone like me, who is using these tools to try and get specific, repeatable, reliable results, the consumer interface, which you see here — and here’s why:
Underneath the hood, in systems like Google Gemini, the consumer version, ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, there’s the model, which does all the work — takes your prompt and processes it, outputs a result. However, before there — there is, on the consumer interfaces, there is a router. There’s a piece of software that looks at the prompt and says, “Where should we send this? How can we — how can we most efficiently help this user out?”
You will notice, with Google’s developer interface here, there’s five different models available. There is Gemini 1.0 Pro, which is the old version, 1.5 Pro, which is the new version, this Flash, which is a faster, but kind of dumber, model. But it’s really, really fast. And there’s two open source models here, Gemini 9 and Gemini 27. When you use the consumer version, there’s a router that says, “Well, what kind of query is this? Is this something simple? If so, let’s route it to a less expensive, computationally expensive model. Let’s route it to 1.5 Flash, rather than Pro, because Pro consumes a lot of resources, is very heavy, it’s slower, but it’s way more accurate, and way more thoughtful, and way more capable than Flash.”
When you’re using a consumer interface, you don’t get that choice. You are automatically routed by its best decision, by best assumptions, where your query should go, how — which model should process your prompt. When using the developer version, you decide what model you want to use because you’re paying per use. When you’re using the developer edition, you’re paying per invocation of the model, whereas, with a consumer interface, you’re paying, like, 20 bucks a month.
AI companies have incentives to run as cheaply as possible. So they will route your prompts to the cheapest model possible. A, it’s faster for you, the user, so it’s theoretically a better experience from a speed perspective, but they’re going to route it to the lowest quality model, because low-quality models are faster, whereas, if you need a specific level of precision, or you need a specific set of capabilities, use the developer version, and you pay more, but you are focused then on the specific model that you want to use, because, presumably — at least that’s what all the companies hope — that’s where you will build an app on top of that specific model.
So I personally — and this is just a “me” thing — I prefer to have that level of control. I like to have that level of control, where I can say, “You know what, for the work that I’m doing, I’m okay turning off the safeties and saying, let’s — let’s go wild, let’s let the model do what it wants to do.” And sometimes you will see, when you’re running in the developer mode, it will flag, like, “Hey, this — we’re flagging this output here, could be dangerous content. We’re still producing it, but we’re telling you, maybe don’t — if you’re building an app on this, don’t show this to the general public, because it could be offensive.” Whereas if you’re in the consumer model, it will just say, “Nope, can’t do that. Sorry.” And you don’t know why, and you don’t have any control over changing that.
I like to think of these things as kind of like — the consumer model is the one that’s user-friendly and has lots of guardrails. It’s like when you’re at the bowling alley and they inflate those little bumpers to fill the gutters, and say, “Okay, well, now you can only bowl in a certain area here.” And for most people, that’s okay. For most people, most of the time, with most use cases, that’s okay. But there is an incentive, there’s a profit incentive, for AI companies to route you to the cheapest possible model, the lowest-performing, cheap model, as opposed to if you want a very — if you want to know what’s going on under the hood, if you want control over which model is going to be processing your prompts, use the developer interfaces.
That’s going to do it for this episode. Thanks for tuning in! We’ll talk to you soon. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button, subscribe to my channel if you haven’t already. And if you want to know when new videos are available, hit the bell button to be notified as soon as new content is live.
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Christopher S. Penn is one of the world’s leading experts on AI in marketing. Christopher Penn has over a decade of AI experience in classical AI, regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI. Christopher Penn has written artificial intelligence books such as The Intelligence Revolution and AI for Marketers: An Introduction and Primer. Christopher Penn is an AI keynote speaker around the world.
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