Google Cloud Next 2024: Pushing the Next Frontier of AI

Google Cloud has been busy with AI innovations in recent months, having introduced new state-of-the-art models such as Gemini AI to support the evolving business landscape. Now, the company is committing itself further to innovations in AI, which have seen much recent progress.

The company’s AI investments are helping place it at the forefront of enterprise digital transformation, with more than 60% of funded generative AI (Gen AI) start-ups and 90% of Gen AI unicorns currently Google Cloud customers.

At Google Cloud’s Next 2024 event, the tech giant is sharing some of its most recent innovations and partnerships. Technology Magazine reviews some of the leading announcements below.

Accessibility: Expanding Vertex AI and other powerful features

Over the last six months, Google Cloud has launched its most capable AI models yet, including Gemini 1.5 Pro - which is now available for public preview for customers and developers alike.

Google Cloud states that the AI model has enhanced performance and opens up new possibilities for businesses to create and build using AI.

“The potential for Gen AI to drive rapid transformation for every business, government and user is only as powerful as the infrastructure that underpins it,” says Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. “Google Cloud offers our AI Hypercomputer, an architecture that combines our powerful TPUs, GPUs, AI software and more to provide an efficient and cost effective way to train and serve models.”

The company’s updated AI offering is now available on Vertex AI, Google’s platform to customise and manage a wide range of leading Gen AI models. The company says that more than one million developers are currently using Google’s Gen AI via its AI Studio and Vertex AI tools.

Likewise, its AI Hypercomputer is now being used by leading AI companies such as Anthropic, AI21 Labs, Contextual AI, Essential AI and Mistral AI. The Hypercomputer aims to employ a system of performance-optimised hardware, open software and machine learning frameworks to enable companies to better advance their digital transformation strategies.

Multiple companies are already harnessing the power of Google Cloud AI, including forward-thinking organisations like Mercedes-Benz, Uber and Palo Alto Networks to bolster their existing services and improve customer experience.

Mercedes-Benz, for example, is harnessing Google AI to improve customer service in call centres and to further optimise their website experience. 

As AI continues to drive transformative progress in the business world, Google Cloud is aiming to help organisations around the world to discover what’s next.

Bolstering cybersecurity to facilitate greater innovation

Google Cloud is also introducing new features that aim to offer AI assistance so that its customers can work and code more efficiently, allowing them to better identify and resolve cybersecurity threats by taking direct action against attacks.

Google Cloud’s product, Gemini in Threat Intelligence, utilises natural language to deliver insights about how threat actors behave. With Gemini’s larger context window, users can analyse much larger samples of potentially malicious code and gain more accurate results.

These AI-driven tools will help businesses take more detailed action, preventing more catastrophic data breaches.

Currently, there is incredible customer innovation across a broad range of industries, including retail, transportation and more. Harnessing Gen AI to fast-forward innovation requires a secure business AI platform that offers end-to-end capabilities that are easy to integrate with existing systems within a business.

Thomas Kurian adds: “At Google, we are engineering our AI platform to address these challenges. Google Cloud is the only major cloud provider offering both first-party and extensible, partner-enabled solutions at every layer of the AI stack. 

“Through Google Cloud’s own innovations and those of our partners, we’re able to provide choice across infrastructure, chips, models, data solutions, and AI tooling to help customers build new Gen AI applications and create business value with this exciting technology.”

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