At this year’s Cloud Next 2024 event, Google Cloud unveiled a host of new artificial intelligence capabilities and tools aimed at helping enterprises leverage the power of generative AI. With a focus on expanded access, enhanced infrastructure, and new applications, the announcements highlight Google’s continued momentum in bringing world-class AI to organizations around the world.
As the headline sponsor and host of Cloud Next 2024, Google used the event to give attendees a first look at the latest developments emerging from its decades of research and work in AI. “Over the last several years, we’ve focused on growing our Cloud business to bring the best of our tools, breakthroughs and compute infrastructure to help others build and transform their businesses,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet. “One of the reasons Cloud is showing so much progress is our deep investments in AI.”
Expanding Access to Powerful AI Models
A major highlight was expanded access to some of Google’s most advanced generative AI systems. Gemini 1.5 Pro, the company’s flagship conversational model, was announced as entering public preview on Google Cloud. With a breakthrough in “long context understanding,” Gemini 1.5 Pro can now process over 1 million tokens of input consistently, unlocking new use cases for enterprises. Google also shared updates to its open-source model Gemma and expanded access to AI tools on its Vertex AI platform.
In addition to these new AI capabilities, Google Cloud used Cloud Next 2024 to showcase the infrastructure powering its advances in generative AI. The company’s AI Hypercomputer, which combines its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), software and more, provides unmatched performance and cost advantages for training and serving large AI models at scale. Google also announced that its most powerful AI accelerator yet, TPU v5, is now generally available to all Cloud customers.
With a focus on “More momentum with generative AI,” Google Cloud’s announcements at Cloud Next 2024 highlighted the company’s continued leadership in AI and commitment to helping enterprises harness this transformational technology. Expanding access to powerful models, enhanced infrastructure, and new applications showed how Google is bringing the latest innovations from its AI research to organizations worldwide.