Google CEO Sundar Pichai opens the Google Cloud Next event. He reflects on the Cloud AI platform, specifically Vertex AI and Duet AI. How different organizations are using AI to develop custom solutions. For example, GM, the car manufacturer, is developing a personal assistant in its cars. Pichai explains that Generative AI is really changing how people do business and how their products work.
Duet AI is the new Google Assistant that you can find in many Google solutions. Most visible is Duet AI in Google Workspace, which is now available. In Google Workspace, Duet AI can summarize documents, write emails, write code, generate images and more. Google Cloud is committed to responsible AI. In this, privacy, safety and security are very important.
Google will be “bold and responsible” in making new Gen AI tools available, says Pichai. After this, Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google Cloud, comes up and takes over the presentation.
Generative AI
Kurian continues on the path of generative AI products. He also states they make a real difference in how you do business. Today, Google is introducing several new Gen AI products.
Developers can start developing their own AI. Google has developed Vertex AI for this purpose. There is also a lot of focus on using Gen AI. Finally, Kurian talks about the creation of an AI ecosystem. The AI ecosystem consists mainly of Vertex AI and Duet AI. Google will offer this from all Google data centers.
The success of Google Cloud is something Kurian wants to highlight as well. He says Yahoo is moving 500 million mailboxes and 550 petabytes of data to Google Cloud. Car manufacturer Mahindra sold 100,000 cars in the first 30 minutes after introducing a new model thanks to Google Cloud. The government of Luxembourg is moving massive amounts of government services to the Google Cloud.
AI Infrastructure
Kurian talks about the new AI infrastructure. He introduces a new Cloud TPU, the Cloud TPU v5e. The new Cloud TPU v5e is twice as fast as its predecessor. More on this in our article on the new Cloud TPU v5e. Google Cloud is also introducing new A3 VMs, based on NVIDIA H100 chips. The A3 VMs can train 3x faster than A2 and offer 10x more bandwidth.
Google Kubernetes Engine gets an extension in the form of GKE Enterprise, GKE enterprise is 45% more productive and 70% faster in deploying containers. Read more in our article on GKE Enterprise.
Organisations sometimes need infrastructure in their own data center, because of latency of regulations. Google Distributed Cloud Hosted provides that capability. It is now possible to deploy AI and Data workloads in your own data center. Kurian says that GDC Hosted is available in many different form factors.
To ensure good connectivity and additional security, Google is coming up with Cross Cloud Network. With Cross Cloud Network, organizations can securely and quickly connect applications between all clouds and SaaS providers.
To make a mark on the success of AI in Google Cloud Kurian states that the adoption of Google Cloud in AI organisations is very high. He states that 70% of all AI unicorns are using Google Cloud.
Partnership with Nvidia
Like every other tech company doing a presentation this year, there is a partnership with Nvidia. Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, comes on stage to talk about it. We learn that Google’s large language models were developed with NVIDIA’s PaxML framework. For this, Google used the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs.
Huang and Kurian announce the development of a new supercomputer in the Google Cloud that will use next-gen AI chips that NVIDIA is now developing. Thomas Kurian also dwells on the difference between TPUs and GPUs. Both can be used for training and inferencing, Google offers more thirteen different configurations to do so. However, there is still much to optimize, which is why Google is coming out with the new Cloud TPU v5e.
Vertex AI
Vodafone, Box and Estee Lauder Companies are already working with Vertex AI. At Estee Lauder, they use social media to understand better what kind of experience people want from Estee Lauder products. To do this, they index text, and analyze it with AI so they can improve their products. In doing so, they want to become the most inclusive beauty brand in the world.
Kurian then introduces improvements to its own models. The new PaLM 2 model supports much more input text. It can now summarize long legal documents or research papers. Codey has become 25% more accurate. At GitLab, they will now integrate Codey to help developers with their development. Also, the Imagen model can now generate even better images and you can give instructions for brand identity.
Also, Google Cloud now has two specific industry models. Sec-PaLM for the security industry and Med-PaLM for the healthcare industry.
In total, Google Cloud offers more than 100 large language models, from Google itself, open source and partners. They are also adding new models from partners.
With Vertex AI, organisations can also develop or extend their own AI models. The data organisations use to train models, and customize models remains the organization’s data. The company data cannot end up with other parties.
More on Vertex AI in our article on the Vertex AI announcements.
Duet AI
Duet AI allows you to use Gen AI in virtually any Google solution. With Duet AI, you have an integrated chat window that can act as a good developer, data engineer, Google Spreadsheet expert, or perfect email writer. During the keynote, Kurian announced that Duet AI is now available for Google Workspace. More than 1 million users are already using Duet AI, as it had been available in preview for a while. That number will grow significantly as Google Workspace now has 10 million paid customers (organizations, not users).
Examples of Duet AI
Duet AI allows you to create presentations and generate images very quickly. For example, if you need insight into Gen Z’s consumer trends, you ask to add a slide with GenZ consumer trends. Duet AI will have data on that and create a slide with a nice summary.
You can also use Duet AI during Google Meets. Say you are 5 minutes late to a meeting, you can get a summary of what was discussed in the first 5 minutes when you enter the meeting. You can even ask if a specific topic has already been discussed. These are just two examples of Duet AI.
More in our article on Duet AI in Google Workspace.
AlloyDB – migrating Oracle databases to Google Cloud
AlloyDB AI is 10x faster in pgvector search. Many times faster than PostGreSQL. Google Cloud now allows you to migrate legacy databases such as Oracle and SQL Server quickly thanks to AI. This involves rewriting the code of custom modules within the legacy database server for AlloyDB. Through GenAI, that code can be easily rewritten. Something that previously took organizations months can now be done with a few clicks. Organizations can now easily migrate their Oracle databases to Google Cloud. In doing so, Kurian is not doing his former employer any favors.
Security
Security should be a priority in every organization. Google acquired security company Mandiant which plays a major role in the security vision of Google according to Kurian.
Mandiant can provide organizations with a lot of insight what they are up against. Google has been providing Internet services to billions of users for years. In terms of security, there is plenty to learn from that, and Mandiant does just that. It also knows how to leverage that knowledge to offer insights to customers of the Google Cloud platform.
A new solution is Mandiant Hunt for Chronicle, where customers can send all their security logs and store them there for a year. Then Mandiant can unleash its technology on those logs to observe potential attacks and alert organizations. This works in real time as long as the logs are continuously synchronized.
On top of that, Google also has the Chronicle CyberShield, which helps governments with their cyber defense. Google’s security data can detect much more than governments can by default detect on their own.
Another exciting addition is Duet AI for Mandiant. You can get assistance from Duet AI to get more insight into certain logs or incidents. What exactly is happening? For example, when you have an outage, you can ask which services are affected by the outage. In some cases, it can even indicate precisely what caused the outage.
Google innovates at lightning speed
With that, we move toward the end of the keynote. Thomas Kurian returns to the stage to talk about Google Cloud partners. Google Cloud has a partner network with more than 100,000 partners. From developers, SaaS providers, data providers to LLM providers. One of the larger partners is Workday. Who are coming to talk about how Workday applications are now available on Google Cloud. With which Google has secured another big customer.
With that, the keynote comes to an end. Google didn’t do all their announcements in the keynote. We also couldn’t cover them all, so in the upcoming days more announcements can be expected.
2 days ago
