Google Cloud Next ’24 Announcements: AI-Powered Future

Google Cloud Next 2024, held from the 9th to 11th of this month, lived up to its billing as the company’s premier AI event. With a focus on innovation and transformation, Google unveiled a suite of new features and services designed to empower businesses with the power of artificial intelligence.

The Google Cloud Next ’24 keynote focused on the transformative power of Generative AI (GenAI) and its integration across Google Cloud services.

Overall, the keynote painted a clear picture of Google Cloud’s vision: a future empowered by AI, where businesses can leverage its capabilities to unlock new possibilities and gain a competitive edge.

A core theme of the event was the integration of AI into all aspects of Google Cloud’s offerings. This included the announcement of Google Vids, a revolutionary AI-powered video creation tool for businesses. Vids promises to streamline the video creation process, making it easier for companies to produce high-quality content.

AI and Machine Learning (AI/ML)

• Gemini 1.5 Pro on Vertex AI: Developers can now leverage the power of Google’s latest large language model (LLM), Gemini 1.5 Pro, through Vertex AI and other AI development platforms (public preview).
• AI Hypercomputer Enhancements:
  • Cloud TPU v5p: This next-generation AI accelerator promises significant performance improvements for demanding workloads.
  • A3 Mega VMs powered by NVIDIA H100 GPUs: This collaboration with NVIDIA offers new virtual machine instances with double the bandwidth per GPU compared to A3 instances, ideal for large-scale AI training and inference.
• Vertex AI and Generative AI: Google Cloud is making it easier for developers to build generative AI applications with tools and services within Vertex AI. “Vertex AI Agent Builder allows people to very easily and quickly build conversational agents,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said. “You can build and deploy production-ready, generative AI-powered conversational agents and instruct and guide them the same way that you do humans to improve the quality and correctness of answers from models.”
• Imagen 2: This is inside its Vertex AI developer platform and has more of a focus on enterprise. Imagen 2 is now generally available and comes with some fun new capabilities, including inpainting and outpainting. There’s also what Google’s calling “text-to-live images” where you can now create short, four-second videos from text prompts, along the lines of AI-powered clip generation tools

Databases

• Gemini comes to databases: Google calls Gemini in Databases a collection of features that “simplify all aspects of the database journey.” In less jargony language, it’s a bundle of AI-powered, developer-focused tools for Google Cloud customers who are creating, monitoring and migrating app databases.
• AlloyDB AI Enhancements: Google’s serverless SQL database gains new vector capabilities, simplified access to remote models, and improved natural language processing support.
• BigQuery Takes Center Stage: Google Cloud emphasizes BigQuery as its unified data analytics platform, including its multi-cloud capabilities with BigQuery Omni.
• Data & Search Integration: Businesses can now incorporate Google Search results into their models, enabling them to leverage the latest and most comprehensive information.

Chrome Enterprise Premium

Google is expanding its Chrome Enterprise product suite with the launch of Chrome Enterprise Premium. What’s new here is that it mainly pertains to security capabilities of the existing service, based on the insight that browsers are now the endpoints where most of the high-value work inside a company is done.

Compute and Networking

• New General-Purpose VMs: C4 and N4 virtual machines powered by 5th Generation Intel Xeon processors offer enhanced compute capabilities.
• Google Axion Chip: Google unveils its first custom Arm-based CPU designed specifically for data center use, promising improved efficiency. Google says its Axion instances offer 30% better performance than other Arm-based instances from competitors like AWS and Microsoft and up to 50% better performance and 60% better energy efficiency than comparable X86-based instances.

Google Distributed Cloud (GDC)

• NVIDIA GPUs on GDC: Businesses can now leverage NVIDIA GPUs for both connected and air-gapped configurations within Google Distributed Cloud.
• GKE on GDC: Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), the container orchestration platform, becomes available on GDC, offering a consistent experience for managing containerized workloads.
• Pre-validated AI Models on GDC: Google Cloud is validating various open-source AI models, including Gemma and Llama 2, for deployment on air-gapped and connected edge environments within GDC.

Workspace Innovations

• Google Vids: This AI-powered video creation tool empowers businesses to produce high-quality video content more efficiently. Google claims users can make videos alongside other Workspace tools like Docs and Sheets. The editing, writing and production is all there. You also can collaborate with colleagues in real time within Google Vids.
• Enhanced Docs and Sheets: New features in Docs include improved Live Caption Translation, while Sheets gains new table formatting and building block templates for faster spreadsheet creation

Security

AI Security Add-on for Workspace: This add-on leverages AI to automatically identify and secure sensitive files within Google Drive, offering an extra layer of protection for businesses.

Open Source

• JetStream and JAX Advancements: Google is committed to open-source AI development with enhancements to JetStream (large model training) and JAX (numerical computation library).
• PyTorch/XLA Releases: Collaboration with the PyTorch community to improve performance through XLA (Accelerated Linear Algebra).

By focusing on AI, security, open-source development, and an enhanced user experience, Google Cloud is making a strong push to empower businesses in the digital age.

Google Cloud Next ’24 painted a clear picture: AI is no longer a future technology, it’s the present. By offering a comprehensive suite of AI-powered tools and services, Google Cloud is poised to empower businesses of all sizes to leverage the power of AI and unlock new possibilities.