Alphabet Inc.’s Google is adding artificial intelligence tools from companies including Meta Platforms Inc. and Anthropic to its cloud platform, weaving more generative AI into its products and positioning itself as a one-stop shop for cloud customers seeking to tap into the technology.
Google’s cloud clients will be able to access Meta’s Llama 2 large language model, as well as AI startup Anthropic’s Claude 2 chatbot, to customise with enterprise data for their own apps and services. The move announced Tuesday at "Google’s Next '23" event in San Francisco, is part of the company’s effort to position its platform as one where customers have the freedom to choose an AI model that best meets their needs, whether from the company itself or one of its partners. More than 100 powerful AI models and tools are now available to Google Cloud clients, the company said.
The company also announced wider availability of its Duet AI product for customers of its Workspace productivity suite, with access for the public to follow later this year. Users can tap a generative AI helper, which responds to prompts to help create content on apps like Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. Duet AI, introduced in May, can take notes during video calls, send meeting summaries and translate captions in 18 languages, Google said. Through a new feature called “attend for me,” users can dispatch the tool to join meetings on their behalf, deliver messages and create a recap of the event.
Google also said it has new partnerships with companies such as GE Appliances and Fox Sports, which will allow customers to take advantage of AI, for example, to create custom recipes or see a playback of a sports event from Fox’s broadcast catalogue.
And Google announced a deepened partnership with chipmaker Nvidia Corp. Google said its cloud offerings will expand to enable more use of Nvidia’s chips and products designed to speed up the training of large language models. Google touted its access to Nvidia’s H100 accelerators — a prized commodity during the AI frenzy — and said it will be letting customers use the latest version of the chipmaker’s so-called supercomputer.
With the announcements, Google is signalling that it’s more willing than ever to work with other companies in artificial intelligence as it aims to gain market share from its competitors. Google has trumpeted its products and services as the finest options in AI, emphasising its years of experience in the field. While the company still trails Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. in the cloud computing market, Google said the AI additions to its cloud catalogue give the platform the widest variety of models to choose from.
“We are in an entirely new era of digital transformation, fueled by gen AI,” Thomas Kurian, chief executive officer of Google Cloud, said in a blog post timed to the announcements. “This technology is already improving how businesses operate and how humans interact with one another.”
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Beyond adding new AI models to its cloud catalogue, Google said it was making improvements to its own AI models and tools. PaLM 2, Google’s large language model that it announced at its annual developers conference in May, is now available in 38 languages and can better analyze longer documents like research papers, books and legal briefs, the company said. Meanwhile, Google’s AI model that helps with coding, called Codey, has been updated to enhance performance. Imagen, the company’s text-to-image app, will feature better-quality images and newer capabilities like style tuning, to help cloud customers better align their images to brand guidelines, the company said.
Amid growing concerns about how companies should deal with the wave of AI-generated content, Google Cloud announced a feature that will embed a watermark to indicate that images were created by artificial intelligence. The feature, which is powered by technology from AI lab Google DeepMind, will include the watermark at the pixel level, meaning it will be hard to alter, the company said.
Google also touted its notable cloud customers and partners in its announcements Tuesday. The company said that more than half of venture-backed generative AI startups pay for Google’s cloud computing platform, including Anthropic, Character.ai and Cohere. The company’s industry-specific models are gaining traction too, it said. Its Med-PaLM 2 model, an AI model adapted for medical settings, now boasts partnerships with healthcare companies such as Bayer Pharmaceuticals, HCA Healthcare Inc. and Meditech, Google said. Its Sec-PaLM 2 model, designed for cybersecurity, is being used by providers like Broadcom Inc. and Tenable, Google added.
The cloud unit also announced a commercial service based on Ampere Computing's new AmpereOne chip that adds weight to the startup's assertion that it can become a rival to chipmakers Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., the dominant providers of processors in data centres. Ampere, backed by Oracle Corp., argues that its chips are more power efficient than rival offerings and better suited to the kind of high-throughput computing that cloud providers need.
