Google’s Cloud Next 2024 event is happening in Las Vegas through Thursday, which means plenty of new cloud-focused news on everything from Gemini, Google’s AI-powered chatbot, to AI in through development and security. Last year’s event was the first in-person Cloud Next since 2019, and Google took the stage to show its continued dedication to AI with its Duet AI for Gmail and many other debuts, including the expansion of generative AI to its security product line and other enterprise-focused updates and debuts.
Don’t have time to watch Google’s full main event archive? It’s OK; We’ve summarized the most important parts of the event below, with additional details from the TechCrunch team on the ground at the event. And Tuesday’s updates weren’t the only things Google made available to non-participants: Wednesday’s developer-focused stream began at 10:30 a.m. PT.
Google Videos
Leveraging AI to help customers develop creative content is something big tech is looking for, and on Tuesday Google introduced its version. Google Vids, a new AI-powered video creation tool, is the latest feature added to Google Workspace.
Here’s how it works: Google says users can create videos with other Workspace tools like Docs and Sheets. The editing, writing and production are there. You can also collaborate with colleagues in real time in Google Vids. Learn more
Gemini Code Assistance
After hearing about Google’s new Gemini Code Assist, an AI code completion and assistance tool for businesses, you may be wondering if this sounds familiar. And you would be right. Frédéric Lardinois, editor-in-chief of TechCrunch, writes that “Google previously offered a similar service under the now-defunct Duet AI brand.” Then Gemini arrived. Code Assist is a direct competitor to GitHub’s Copilot Enterprise. here’s why
And to put Gemini Code Assist in context, Alex Wilhelm details its competition with Copilot, as well as its potential risks and benefits for developers, in the latest episode of TechCrunch Minute.
Google Workspace
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Image credits: Google
New features include voice prompts to launch the AI-powered “Help me write” feature in Gmail on the go. Another one for Gmail includes a way to instantly turn draft emails into a more polished email. On Sheets, you can send a customizable alert when a certain field changes. Meanwhile, a new set of templates makes it easier to start a new spreadsheet. For Doc lovers, tabs are now supported. This is a good thing because, according to the company, you can “organize information in a single document instead of linking to multiple documents or searching through Drive.” Of course, subscribers receive the benefits first. Learn more
Google also appears to have plans to monetize two of its new AI features for the Google Workspace productivity suite. This will look like add-on packages at $10/month/user. One is the new AI Meetings and Messaging add-on that takes notes for you, provides meeting summaries, and translates content into 69 languages. The other is for introduced an AI security package, which helps administrators further secure Google Workspace content. Learn more
Picture 2
In February, Google announced an image generator built into Gemini, Google’s AI-powered chatbot. The company removed it shortly after discovering that it was randomly injecting gender and racial diversity into prompts about people. This has led to some offensive inaccuracies. Awaiting a possible re-release, Google has released the improved image generation tool, Imagen 2. It is part of its Vertex AI development platform and is more enterprise-focused. Imagen 2 is now available for everyone and comes with some fun new features, including inpainting and outpainting. There is also what Google calls them “text-to-live images” where you can now create short, four-second videos from text prompts, similar to AI-powered clip generation tools such as Track, Pika And Irreverent laboratories. Learn more
Vertex AI Agent Builder
We all need a little help, right? Meet Google’s Vertex AI Agent Builder, a new tool to help businesses build AI agents.
“Vertex AI Agent Builder makes it super easy and quick for users to build chatbots,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “You can build and deploy production-ready AI-powered generative chatbots and instruct and guide them the same way you do humans to improve the quality and accuracy of model responses . »
To do this, the company uses a process called “grounding,” in which responses are linked to something considered a reliable source. In this case it relies on Google search (which in reality may or may not be accurate). Learn more
Gemini comes to databases
Google calls Gemini in Databases a set of features that “simplify every aspect of the database journey.” In less jargon, it’s a set of AI-driven, developer-focused tools for Google Cloud customers who build, monitor, and migrate application databases. Learn more
Google renews its focus on data sovereignty
Image credits: MirageC/Getty Images
Google has offered cloud sovereignties before, but it is now focusing more on partnerships rather than building them alone. Learn more
Security tools benefit from some AI love
Image credits: Getty Images
Google is joining the AI-powered generative security tools bandwagon with a number of new products and features aimed at large enterprises. These include Threat Intelligence, which can analyze large portions of potentially malicious code. It also allows users to perform natural language searches to detect ongoing threats or indicators of compromise. Another example is Chronicle, Google’s cybersecurity telemetry offering for cloud customers to help with cybersecurity investigations. The third is the Security Command Center cybersecurity and enterprise risk management suite. Learn more
Nvidia’s Blackwell platform
One of the expected announcements is the arrival of Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell platform on Google Cloud in early 2025. Yes, that seems that far away. However, here’s what’s in store: support for the high-performance Nvidia HGX B200 for AI and HPC workloads and the GB200 NBL72 for large language model (LLM) training. Oh, and we can reveal that the GB200 servers will be liquid cooled. Learn more
Chrome Enterprise Premium
Meanwhile, Google is expanding its Chrome Enterprise suite of products with the launch of Chrome Enterprise Premium. What’s new here is that it’s primarily about the security capabilities of the existing service, based on the idea that browsers are now the endpoints where most high-end work happens. value within a company. Learn more
Gemini 1.5 Pro
Image credits: Google
Anyone can use a “half” from time to time, and Google obliges with Gemini 1.5 Pro. According to Kyle Wiggers, it is “Google’s most capable generative AI model” and is now available for public preview on Vertex AI, Google’s business-focused AI development platform. Here’s what you get for this half: TThe amount of context it can process, which ranges from 128,000 tokens to 1 million tokens, where “tokens” refers to subdivided bits of raw data (such as the syllables “fan”, “heap”, and “tick”) in the word “fantastic”). Learn more
Open source tools
Image credits: Getty Images
At Google Cloud Next 2024, the company launched a number of open source tools primarily aimed at supporting generative AI projects and infrastructure. One of them is Max Diffusion, which is a collection of reference implementations of various diffusion models that run on XLA, or Accelerated Linear Algebra, devices. Then there’s JetStream, a new engine for running generative AI models. The third is MaxTest, a collection of text-generating AI models targeting Nvidia TPUs and GPUs in the cloud. Learn more
Axion
Image credits: Google
We don’t know much about this one, however, here’s what we do know: Google Cloud joins AWS and Azure to announce its first custom-built Arm processor, dubbed Axion. Frédéric Lardinois writes that “based on Arm’s Neoverse 2 designs, Google claims its Axion instances deliver 30% better performance than other Arm-based instances from competitors like AWS and Microsoft and up to 50% better performance and 60% more energy efficient than the comparable X86. -instances based on “. Learn more
The full Google Cloud Next keynote
If all that’s not enough for a deluge of AI and cloud updates, you can watch the entire event keynote via the embed below.
Google Cloud Next developer talk
Google held a separate keynote for developers on Wednesday. They offered a deeper dive into the ins and outs of a number of tools described during Tuesday’s keynote, including Gemini Cloud Assist, using AI for product recommendations and chat agents, se ending with a presentation of Hugging Face. You can view the full keynote below.
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