He’s not an executive, a company spokesperson, or a world-class researcher. But he might be Google’s secret weapon in winning the AI race.

If you’re an AI developer, you’ve likely heard of Logan Kilpatrick. As Google’s head of developer relations, Kilpatrick, 27, runs AI Studio, the company’s AI developer software program.

He has also become Google’s delegate for speaking to the AI community and — intentionally or not — a one-man marketing machine for the company’s AI products. He’s a prolific poster on X, where he’ll sometimes hype Google’s latest Gemini releases or tease something new on the horizon.

Above all, he is one of the people tasked with translating Google’s AI breakthroughs to the global developer community. It’s a crucial job at a time when the search giant needs to not just convince developers to use its products, but capture a new generation of builders entering the fray as AI makes it easier for anyone to make software.

“If you want AI to have the level of impact on humanity that I think it could have, you need to be able to provide a platform for developers in order to go and do this stuff,” he told Business Insider in an interview. “The reality is there’s a thousand and one things that Google is never going to build, and doesn’t make sense for us to build, that developers want to build.”

Company insiders say Google has recognized Kilpatrick’s strength and given him more responsibilities and visibility. He could be seen onstage at this year’s Google I/O conference and even had a fireside chat with Google cofounder Sergey Brin.

“People really crave legitimacy, authenticity, and competency, and Logan combines all three,” Asara Near, a startup founder who has occasionally contacted Kilpatrick with development questions, told BI.

LoganGPT

In 2022, OpenAI was preparing to launch ChatGPT and fire the starting gun on one of history’s most profound technological shifts. Kilpatrick, who has a technical background and worked at Apple and NASA, saw an online job ad for OpenAI and was soon facing a tricky decision: to work at what was then Sam Altman’s little-known startup, or take a gig at IBM.

He decided that OpenAI was worth a shot — and within a few months, found himself at the center of the biggest tech launch since the debut of the iPhone in 2007.

“The OpenAI experience was a startup experience for about six months and then it became basically a hyperscaler,” he told BI. It was chaotic, but it helped Kilpatrick learn how to build an ecosystem and cut his teeth as the developers’ go-to guy. There, developers nicknamed him “LoganGPT.”

When he left OpenAI in 2024 for Google, developers and peers made clear it was a huge loss for the ChatGPT maker, and a big win for Google in the AI talent transfer window. AI Studio was then still a project inside Google’s Labs division, and Kilpatrick and his team were tasked with migrating it into a fully-fledged product inside Google’s Cloud unit. It was again like going from zero to one: AI Studio was pre-revenue with no customers, but with a long tail of developers ready to jump on board.

“It has felt oddly almost like the same exact experience I’ve lived through at two different companies and two different cultures,” he told BI.

In May this year, Kilpatrick was promoted, and his team running AI Studio was moved from the Cloud unit to Google DeepMind, bringing them closer to the researchers working on the underlying models and the employees working on its Gemini chatbot.

“He’s kind of all over the place, and that’s his superpower,” said one senior employee who requested anonymity because they were not permitted to speak to the media. They said that Google has put Kilpatrick in charge of more products as leaders have recognized his ability to engage so effectively with the developer community. “Logan is 90% of Google’s marketing,” they said.

Helping Google win

On paper, Google is an AI winner. The reality is more complicated.

Its latest Gemini 2.0 Pro model ranks top of multiple leaderboards across a range of testing areas, but this hasn’t always been reflected in the number of users. Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, said in May that the company’s Gemini app has more than 400 million monthly active users. That’s well behind the 500 million weekly active users for ChatGPT, according to figures shared by Altman in April.

“DeepMind doesn’t get nearly as much credit and attention as they deserve, and that’s because comms is vastly underperforming capabilities,” communications executive Lulu Meservey posted on X in May. Responding to another person, she wrote: “Logan is like 90% of their comms.”

Some of the struggle, insiders say, is due to Google owning multiple products that aren’t always clearly distinct. Developers can build using Vertex in Google Cloud or AI Studio. Meanwhile Google has a consumer-facing app simply called Gemini. The same models aren’t necessarily always available across all three places at the same time, which can get confusing for users and developers.

There’s also the problem of being a quarter-century-old tech behemoth with more nimble startups nipping at its heels. “OpenAI can put all their messaging arrows behind one thing, while Google has messaging arrows behind 10,000 things,” former Google product manager Rajat Paharia told BI.

Kilpatrick recognizes that Google has work to do. “I think Google on a net basis is doing so much in the world right now, and AI is around everything that we’re doing, and I think a lot of narrative doesn’t capture innovation is happening,” he said.

A big part of Kilpatrick’s job is trying to cement that narrative among the global developer base. At OpenAI, Sam Altman’s Jobsian showmanship has made him a highly effective salesman both for his company’s products and his vision for the future of this technology. Or, as Paharia described Altman to BI, a “showman with rizz.”

Google may have found its equivalent in Kilpatrick. He told BI that he often posts on X because it has become something of a town square for AI developers and enthusiasts, all champing at the bit for the latest crumb of news. It’s a community filled with hype, AI “vagueposting”, and steeped deeply in lore (what did Ilya see?).

On a day that OpenAI’s latest release sucking is grabbing everyone’s attention, Kilpatrick may log on and post a single word — “Gemini” — just to rev the hype engine a little.

Kilpatrick often has “a thousand” emails from developers that need responding to, he told BI. “I spend probably as much time as I physically can responding to stuff these days,” he said. And that’s between the numerous product meetings (he had 22 meetings scheduled on the day we spoke in early July, 23 the day before). He once posted on X: “I am online 7 days a week, ~8+ hours a day. If you need something as you build with Gemini, please ping me!”

Developers say they like that Kilpatrick takes the time to engage and listen to their feedback. “The few times I’ve emailed him to get help with something, they near-instantly responded and helped resolve the issue,” said Near, the startup founder. “This is the opposite of my experience through normal support channels.”

Andrew Curran, an AI commentator who frequently posts to X, wrote last month that Kilpatrick had been “an incredible hire” for Google. “To a lot of people he is now the face of Gemini, I bet most people don’t even remember his OAI days,” he wrote.

Kilpatrick told BI that because he is a developer himself, he finds it easy to understand the core target user. He said this has helped in building out Google’s AI Studio, and that engaging with developers comes naturally. “It’s just the obvious thing to do if you want to build a product for developers, is like, go talk to your users,” he said.

But the definition of developer is changing with approaches like vibe coding, which lets non-technical people create software by describing what they’d like to an AI tool.

“What it means to be a developer right now looks a little different than it did two years ago or three years ago, and I think it’s going to look fundamentally different in 10 years,” said Kilpatrick. He believes the developer group will “massively expand” in the next five years. His job at Google is to make the next generation believe Google is where they should be developing, but that job is also evolving in this new era of artificial intelligence.

“Our mandate is actually AI builders, already encompassing this group of people who maybe don’t identify as developers and don’t write code, but they build software using AI, and I think that’s going to accelerate in the next few years,” he said.

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Co-founder of Scale AI and founder of Passes, Lucy Guo pivoted from the tech-bro world of artificial intelligence to the ‘Hollywood’ creator space. But AI has its place in content creation, says Lucy

Lucy Guo, founder and CEO of Passes, wants to turn content creators into millionaires. The 30 year old recently became a billionaire in her own right, though it’s “all on paper” as she told Forbes right before they crowned her the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world.

Passes is Lucy’s big bet in the creator economy. Speaking to The Mirror, she describes seeing “untapped potential” in the creator monetisation space back in 2020 after falling in with some content creators in Miami.

“I just saw how they could sell anything with an Instagram post or story” recalls Lucy. “I also saw how inconsistent their income could be.”

Her solution to the instability was for creators to monetise directly off their fan base, which would not only give creators direct, consistent income but the means to invest in other interests or business ventures. Ventures that could be passion projects or, as Lucy envisions, potentially large-scale product-based businesses.

READ MORE: Audible’s new AI plans will put jobs at major risk, say translators and voice actors

Given Lucy’s significant background in AI, Passes’ approach is decidedly tech-forward compared to other fan subscriber platforms. While the technical approach separates Passes from its competitors, there’s been a lot of scepticism from creators about AI – viewed as both a potential competitor and thief. But Lucy is adamant AI’s utility will become clear.

“When creators realise the benefits of AI, they’re going to change their perception and they’re going to be very excited about it. But at the moment, there’s a lot of fear. And fear prevents you from looking at all the upsides.”

She continues: “The whole world is like ‘AI is going to take over’ and I’m just like ‘no, it’s going to be our co-pilot. It’s gonna be our best business partner’.”

AI will help content creators post quickly and often – which is key to long-term success according to Lucy. “We’ve actually noticed our creators that make the most money, they’re actually smaller. They have 200, 300,000 followers,” says Lucy. “My hypothesis is that it’s because they just churn out more content because it doesn’t need to be perfect”.

The question of what matters to fans boils down to speed and community, according to Lucy. “I would say in terms of what everyone wants it’s very, very fast customer service – whether the customer service they want is from the creator or from [Passes].”

Lucy also believes that women tend to lean more towards content creation and, simply put: “they’re better at it”.

“I think being a content creator requires a lot of empathy and being able to build relationships especially when they’re not in person. You’re building relationships with your fans digitally. And the traits needed to do that I think women are better at,” she explains.

By Lucy’s estimation, AI will make building those relationships easier and faster because it will free up creator’s time to engage fans and think creatively. But she will need to work on building meaningful relationships with creators to test her bet.

After Passes acquired the competitor site, Fanhouse in 2023, Lucy faced backlash from creators who felt blindsided by the acquisition. Creators found Passes’ lack of content guidelines and AI push alarming.

As reported by TechCrunch at the time, some creators grew worried about a tweet of Guo’s in which she stated that Passes was working on technology that could optionally make AI likenesses of creators. Concerns escalated after Twitch streamer Riley Rose pointed out that Passes does not have content guidelines on its website.

“It’s just that [Fanhouse’s] content guidelines are very, very specific,” Guo clarified to TechCrunch. She said that because Fanhouse used Stripe as its payment processor, the company had to be very clear with users about what they can and cannot post. “We do have content guidelines, it’s just more lax,” she explained.

Now, convincing creators to embrace AI and bring their fanbase to a new platform – many of whom aren’t accustomed to paying directly for their content – promises to be a tough sell even if Lucy is promising significant returns. And just as with fans, it isn’t all about the money for creators.

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