Jess Lee

for The DEV Team

Posted on Sep 3 • Edited on Sep 4

Join the Google AI Studio Multimodal Challenge: $3,000 in Prizes!

#devchallenge #googleaichallenge #gemini #ai

We're excited to announce our first challenge with Google AI!

Running through September 14, the Google AI Studio Multimodal Challenge invites you to build and deploy innovative applets that showcase the incredible power of Gemini's multimodal capabilities.

There's one prompt for this challenge but three chances to win! We hope you give it a try.

Our Prompt

Your mission is to build and deploy an applet on Google AI Studio that shows off the power of Gemini in multimodal content understanding and/or generation.

Your applet must meet these requirements:

Built on Google AI Studio
Deployed using Cloud Run
Utilize at least one of the below multimodal functionality:
- Gemini 2.5 Pro / Flash-supported image, video, or audio understanding
- Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (free tier available for Sept 6-7)
- Live API (free tier supports 3 concurrent sessions)
- Imagen (requires paid tier)
- Veo (requires paid tier)

Think interactive storytelling experiences, tools that process audio and visual content, platforms that understand and generate content across multiple media types. If you can think it, you can build it!

Important Notes:

Use of paid APIs are purely optional and won't enhance your chance of winning.
- If you used Gemini 2.5 Flash Image during the free trial period and it is no longer available for your app during the judging period, be sure to include a video so we can see your project in action.
"Build Apps with Google AI Studio" DEV Education Track submissions do not count towards this challenge, you must build and deploy a new, original applet.

How To Participate

To participate, create your Google AI Studio account and publish a post using the submission template below.

Your applet should demonstrate creative and practical applications of Gemini's multimodal capabilities. Think beyond basic demos - how can multimodal AI solve real problems or create delightful experiences?

Google AI Studio Challenge Submission Template

Be sure to review our judging criteria, rules, guidelines, and FAQ page before submitting so you understand our participation guidelines and official contest rules.

Please note: additional eligibility requirements are listed below.

Prizes

We'll select three winners for this challenge. Each winner will receive:

$1,000 USD
DEV++ Membership
Exclusive DEV Badge

All Participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge on their DEV profile.

Getting Started with Google AI Studio 🛠️

New to Google AI Studio? You can get to know Google AI Studio by tackling the "Build Apps with Google AI Studio" DEV Education Track:

Announcing the First DEV Education Track: "Build Apps with Google AI Studio"

Jess Lee for The DEV Team ・ Jul 2

#learngoogleaistudio #ai #deved #gemini

DEV Tutorial

From prompt to deployed app in less than 2 minutes

Paige Bailey for Google AI ・ Jul 2

#webdev #programming #ai #gemini

Eligibility Requirements

This specific challenge includes the following restrictions:

Territories and regions excluded:
Afghanistan, Belarus, Central African Republic, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Iraq, Kosovo, Libya, Myanmar (Burma), North Korea, Russia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Venezuela, Yemen,
Crimea, the so-called Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), the so-called Luhansk People's Republic (LNR).
Additional participant exclusions for this challenge: Government institution employees, Google employees
Open only to 18+

These challenge-specific restrictions are in addition to all eligibility requirements and exclusions detailed in our General Contest Official Rules and Google AI Studio Multimodal v25.09.03 Contest Rules.

Important Dates

September 3: Google AI Studio Multimodal Challenge begins!
September 14: Submissions due at 11:59 PM PDT
October 2: Winners Announced

We can't wait to see the innovative applets you build with Google AI Studio! Questions about the challenge? Ask them below.

Good luck and happy coding!

Top comments (42)

Ben Halpern The DEV Team • Sep 3

This is going to be epic

Noah Brinker The DEV Team • Sep 3

Can't wait to see these

Moinul Moin • Sep 4

Thats cool

Jim Hill • Sep 3

This looks awesome

Dela • Sep 4

Interesting challenge, but I have a question: If I recall correctly, doesn't deploying an applet to Cloud Run require a billing account, which in turn incurs billing for the participant per run? Is the deployment part mandatory?

Jess Lee The DEV Team • Sep 4

Hey @delaaja, great call out. Deployment is required, and Cloud Run actually has a substantial free tier, which should cover anything incurred from our judging usage. Please see this page here to see what's covered, so you can be aware while testing (pre-submission): https://cloud.google.com/run?e=48754805&hl=en#pricing

Divya • Sep 8 • Edited

Hello mam @jess
Can I create the app in Gemini itself, then zip the code, and work on it locally using Gemini CLI? I'll be deploying the app, but not using Cloud Run, but probably Netlify/Vercel.

Would it be eligible, or will it make it ineligible for the challenge?

Sebastian Van Rooyen • Sep 4

Exactly!

Prema Ananda • Sep 7

Question about contest rules:

Hi! I have a question about the development workflow for this challenge.

My situation:

I created a new, original applet in Google AI Studio specifically for this contest
Downloaded the generated code to continue development locally
Now I'm enhancing it further using Gemini CLI for additional features and improvements

Is this approach compliant with the contest rules? The applet was created from scratch for the challenge, but I'm now developing it further outside of the AI Studio interface using Google's own development tools.

Thanks for clarification!

Olga Braginskaya • Sep 6

To be honest, I don't really understand the point of the challenge. The models that can actually generate something useful are all paid. Fine, I added billing. Now I’ve built a game, and it generates images during gameplay. The limit for the first tier is 70 requests per day. I have 4 images per run, so basically I used up all my requests just this morning and now I can’t even record a video of the game. I’ll have to wait until tomorrow.

The third model, imagen-3.0-generate-001, isn’t even available via API, it says it’s not supported. And to move to Tier 2, I apparently need to spend $300 somehow.

So overall, it’s not really clear what the organizers were expecting. I'll wait for tomorrow to record my demo videos but overall so far experience is not what I expected for the goal "Think interactive storytelling experiences, tools that process audio and visual content, platforms that understand and generate content across multiple media types."

Olga Braginskaya • Sep 6

ok, I found that gemini-2.5-flash-image-preview also can generate images - but Google AI Studio doesn't know how to use this model so in the end I fixed the code by myself.