Venture Step

Google Gems vs. Meta AI: Building Your First AI Agent

Dalton Anderson

10 Sep 2024 • 9 min read

TL;DR

Google Gemini Gems excel at productivity with powerful prompt refiners, while Meta AI Studio leans into social engagement. The barrier to creating a useful AI agent is lower than ever. #VentureStep #AIAgents #GoogleGemini

INTRODUCTION

From generating podcast outlines to crafting social media posts, customizable AI agents are becoming incredibly capable tools for entrepreneurs and professionals. ¹The rise of platforms like Google's Gemini Gems and Meta's AI Studio has put the power of creating bespoke AI assistants into everyone's hands, but they offer fundamentally different approaches. ² One is built for productivity and workflow automation, while the other is designed for social interaction and creative engagement.

In this episode of Venture Step, host Dalton Anderson dives deep into both platforms by building a duplicate of his custom AI agent, "Curio," on each one. ³With a background in programming and data science, Dalton provides a unique, hands-on perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of Google's and Meta's offerings. ⁴ He explores the creation process, the intended user for each platform, and the surprising differences in their core philosophies.

This comparison uncovers which platform is better suited for specific tasks—from managing complex corporate workflows to creating playful social media characters. Dalton also performs a live demonstration, building a brand new AI agent from scratch in just minutes to show how accessible this technology has become, particularly with game-changing features like Google's AI-powered instruction refiner. 555

KEY TAKEAWAYS

A Tale of Two Philosophies: Google's Gemini Gems are geared toward power users and productivity, offering a "blank canvas" for creating workflow-oriented agents. ⁶In contrast, Meta AI Studio focuses on social engagement, with its most popular agents being character-based for entertainment. ⁷
Creation Experience: Creating an agent in Meta AI Studio is like filling out a rigid form, making it simple but limited. ⁸⁸⁸Google Gems provide an open-ended instruction field, which is more powerful and flexible, especially for complex tasks. ⁹
The Prompt Refiner is a Game-Changer: Google's single best feature is an AI agent that refines your instructions for you. ¹⁰¹⁰It can turn a few sentences of unstructured ideas into a perfectly formatted, detailed prompt, drastically lowering the barrier to entry for creating a high-quality agent. ¹¹¹¹
Accessibility and Integration: Meta's agents are easily discoverable and shareable on social platforms like Instagram, making them public-facing by default. ¹²¹²Google's Gems are currently private and desktop-only, built more for personal or internal team use. ¹³¹³

FULL CONVERSATION

Dalton: Welcome to Venture Step Podcasts, where we discuss entrepreneurship, industry trends, and the occasional book review. ¹⁴From generating podcast outlines to crafting social media posts, AI agents are becoming increasingly more capable. ¹⁵Today, we're going to be discussing Google's new release of their Gemini Gems, which is their version of an AI agent. ¹⁶There are some that come out of the box from Google, like the brainstormer, writing assistant, and learning helper, but you can create your own gems. ¹⁷

Dalton: And that's what we're going to be discussing today. In fact, I did create a duplicate of the Facebook AI agent that we created a little bit ago called Curio. 18So I have a Curio Meta AI Studio agent, and then I have a Curio Google Gemini agent. 19It's going to be interesting because I'll break down the differences between the two and you can figure out which route you want to take. 20In today's episode, we're going to be discussing the differences between Google Gemini's Gems approach and Meta AI Studios, a comparison of the features and potential capabilities, and my personal experiences with these AI agents on both platforms. 21

Dalton: It seems like everywhere you go, every company is talking about AI. What does AI offer to you? ²²And how easy is it for you to apply AI in your life or in your workplace? ²³There are a couple of different types of AI, like social AI, which I'm less fond of. ²⁴If you go on Meta AI Studio, the most popular AI agents are things like, "talk to your lonely, depressed ghost boyfriend" or "talk with your vampire girlfriend who has trouble sleeping." ²⁵Some teenager love novel type of character build, and those are the most popular chats for Meta Studio. ²⁶When I was looking at it when it just came out, they had like 60,000 chats and they're by far the most popular ones. ²⁷

Dalton: That's an example of Meta's approach. And I would think that Meta is a bit more social-oriented obviously than Google's approach, which is more workflow management or automation-ish. ²⁸

Dalton: Meta AI Studio's approach is more social, as I was saying, and that's where they're going to lean into, which makes the most sense. ²⁹ Meta is just not going to roll out a workflow management platform. They tried to, I think they had a platform called Facebook Workplace Connect. ³⁰The premise of it was like Facebook, but in a workplace manner where you had workplace events and groups and all sorts of stuff. ³¹It was social media for your workplace, which seemed decent enough, but they dropped it to focus on AI. ³²

Dalton: As I was saying, the core features of Google are more towards power users or a corporation or a team. ³³Meta's AI Studio is more about the social aspect. ³⁴Your instruction prompts are very easy to put together. ³⁵It has the structure that they want you to follow, and you kind of just fill in the information like you're filling out a form. ³⁶So it seems a little bit more rigid than Google's approach, which is like a canvas and you paint whatever you want. ³⁷

Dalton: With Meta's AI Studio, which I think is pretty neat, you basically create a character. I created Curio, and Curio has its own little personality and a profile photo. 38When you create this AI agent, it goes on your social media platforms. 39So if someone goes on my Instagram, in my bio, they can see that I have created an AI agent. 40 And that AI agent is displayed on my profile. People can click on it and interact with my AI agent, which I think is pretty cool. 41

Dalton: When you create a Meta AI Studio AI agent, it's open to everyone. ⁴²I could search up your AI agent that you created and I could use it. ⁴³Whereas Gemini is closed and then you open it if you want. ⁴⁴

Google's "Blank Canvas" and the Power of the Prompt Refiner

Dalton: One thing I thought was pretty interesting with Google's approach is this blank canvas piece where you kind of instruct the agent exactly what you want it to do. ⁴⁵ It's pretty in-depth. It took me longer to set up and make sure it was good to go than Meta's AI Studio. ⁴⁶ But one thing I did like with Google's setup was once you set up the instructions, they have another instruction AI agent. This instruction AI agent will refine your instruction prompt that you provided originally. ^47474747It will basically improve it and make it curated to creating AI agents. ⁴⁸

Dalton: You can just say what you want unstructured and it will structure it for you, which is pretty neat. ⁴⁹It saves a lot more time... I think the prompt that the instruction prompt refiner is better than the one that I generated myself. ⁵⁰

Dalton: I think that's one of the key hurdles for people who want to create AI agents: how do you get started? ⁵¹ How do you train your chat? How do you make sure that things are working correctly? ⁵²That is a lot easier now because we have these instructor refiner AI agents that will take care of that information for you. ⁵³All you have to worry about is writing a couple sentences of what you want and it will do it for you. ⁵⁴

From Unreliable Chats to a Dedicated "Venture Episode Engine"

Dalton: I did train an AI agent to write my podcast outlines for the episodes. ⁵⁵ Previously, I had a chat. My chat was all trained up with how I wanted my podcast outlines to be. ⁵⁶You would use it for a couple of months and then randomly one day it just doesn't want to do it anymore. ⁵⁷ It just does whatever it wants. And I can't get it back to the way it's supposed to be. ⁵⁸

Dalton: I have to train a new chat. And then that chat works for a while. I'm super happy and excited... and then the same thing happens again. ⁵⁹And so now I'm on my third Venture Step podcast outline chat. ⁶⁰

Dalton: So I created a Venture Step agent, I called it the Venture Episode Engine. ⁶¹ Ooh, very mysterious and sounds cool. It's got some swag to it if you ask me. ⁶²I love Google Gemini, but randomly I feel like the chats, after a certain time—and the same thing happens with ChatGPT and Claude, by the way—they stop working. ⁶³I just use Gemini a lot for Venture Step because all my stuff's on Google and I do my outlines in Google Docs, and I like the way that Google Docs and Gemini are compatible. ⁶⁴

Platform Accessibility: Why Desktop Still Reigns for Creation

Dalton: I think it's pretty cool that with Meta, you can interact with your friends or on Instagram. ⁶⁵You can use your AI agent on Facebook or wherever you are; you can use it on your phone. ⁶⁶I think that's pretty neat where you have it everywhere. ⁶⁷You don't have that current ability right now with Google Gems, because you can only access it on your desktop or laptop. ⁶⁸ Why that is, I don't know. Maybe because of the compute and they don't want it open to mobile users. ⁶⁹I know that they just rolled it out, so maybe they'll wait a bit and launch it on mobile. ⁷⁰But I think with the feature that Gemini has where they have that AI prompt refiner, I think it's doable on your phone. ⁷¹But to create Meta's AI agent, it would be too difficult on your phone because you have to format everything and be very clear on your ask. ⁷²

Live Demo: Building a Travel Planner AI Agent in Minutes

Dalton: Okay, so Google's working up its magic. We've got the culinary challenge, the travel itinerary builder, and the writing coach. ⁷³Let's do the travel itinerary builder. ⁷⁴So it's just making up whatever nonsense. ⁷⁵So let's just copy this in here. ⁷⁶ We got a prompt from AI. This is unstructured nonsense anyway, so it doesn't really matter. ⁷⁷So at the bottom here, you have this little "use Gemini to rewrite your instructions." ⁷⁸We're going to rewrite our instructions and you'll see it just change. ⁷⁹

Dalton: This is huge because it makes it so much easier to create AI agents. ⁸⁰It broke down your unformatted text into a concise, clear prompt for your AI agent of what you expect. ⁸¹

Dalton: This is huge because once again I feel like the biggest hurdle of these things is getting started and knowing where to start. ⁸²We were at a minute and 14 seconds to create this AI agent. ⁸³And now we're going to ask it to help me plan a trip to Japan. ⁸⁴It breaks down an event to do every day, and then it sends you the link of what it's talking about, and you can see a photo and kind of see what's going on. ⁸⁵I don't know if this is world-class travel planner vibes, but I think it could get there with some additional prompts and me giving a better prompt with more information. ⁸⁶

AI Agents Are Now More Approachable Than Ever

Dalton: That was an example of how easy it is to create an AI agent. ⁸⁷It's not rocket science and it's very approachable now. ⁸⁸ You don't even have to make the prompts anymore. You just got to write a couple of sentences, use your AI prompt refiner, and start optimizing your day. ⁸⁹

Dalton: Always look for ways to save time. Time is the most valuable resource that you have. ⁹⁰And if you can save, what, 20 minutes a day, that really adds up over a year. ⁹¹ If you can save your team time, that's huge. And then if you can save the company time, that's massive. ⁹²

Dalton: The whole point of this episode was how approachable creating an AI agent is. ⁹³ And it's very easy and not difficult. There's plenty of tools to help you. ⁹⁴I think just the toughest part is just getting started and finding something that you're comfortable using and optimizing your life for. ⁹⁵ So start small. Organize your notes. ⁹⁶I think that's how I got started years ago was I liked writing down notes, but I didn't like organizing them. ⁹⁷So I would type out my notes and then I would give AI the chance to organize them for me. ⁹⁸I definitely invite you to share your experiences with these AI agents and comment on this video. ⁹⁹

RESOURCES MENTIONED

Google Gemini Gems
Meta AI Studio
Curio (AI Agent)
Venture Episode Engine (AI Agent)
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube
ChatGPT
Claude
Google Docs
Google Sheets
Instagram
Facebook
Cursor AI
Project IDX
VS Code
Reflection (70B parameter model)

INDEX OF CONCEPTS

Dalton Anderson, Venture Step, Google, Gemini Gems, Meta, Meta AI Studio, Curio, Facebook, Instagram, Apple, Samsung, Dungeons & Dragons, Facebook Workplace Connect, ChatGPT, Claude, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Venture Episode Engine, Tokyo, Japan, Mount Fuji, Seoul, South Korea, YouTube, Cursor AI, VS Code, Project IDX, Reflection