Google is adding artificial intelligence tools from companies including Meta Platforms and Anthropic to its cloud platform, weaving more generative AI into its products and billing itself as a one-stop shop for 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 customize with enterprise data for their own apps and services.
The move 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 at its Next '23 event on August 29.
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. 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 catalog.
And Google announced a deepened partnership with chipmaker Nvidia.
Google's cloud offerings will expand to enable more use of Nvidia's chips and products designed to speed up the training of large language models.
The company 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 supercomputer.
With the announcements, Google is signaling 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, emphasizing its years of experience in the field.
While it still trails Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud computing market, Google said the AI additions to its cloud catalog 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 .
"This technology is already improving how businesses operate and how humans interact with one another."
Beyond adding new AI models to its cloud catalog, Google said it was making improvements to its own AI models and tools.
PaLM 2, its 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, its 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.
Amid growing concerns about 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, powered by technology from AI lab Google DeepMind, will include the watermark at the pixel level, meaning it will be hard to alter.
Google also touted its notable cloud customers and partners. The company said that more than half of venture-backed generative AI startups pay for its cloud computing platform, including Anthropic, Character.ai and Cohere.
The company's industry-specific models are gaining traction too.
Med-PaLM 2, an AI model adapted for medical settings, now boasts partnerships with healthcare companies such as Bayer Pharmaceuticals, HCA Healthcare and Meditech,
Sec-PaLM 2, designed for cybersecurity, is being used by providers like Broadcom and Tenable, Google added.
Bloomberg
