Cloud Next 2024: Boosting AI Innovation

Google has been a pioneer in the cloud since its inception. In recent years, we've poured our efforts into expanding our Cloud business, aiming to share our cutting-edge tools, innovative breakthroughs, and robust compute infrastructure with businesses worldwide to help them transform and grow.

Our Cloud business has been on a remarkable upward trajectory. In the fourth quarter, we hit an annual revenue run rate of $36 billion—a figure that's quintupled in just five years.

A key driver behind this growth is our substantial investment in AI. We've long believed that AI would be the next big wave to revolutionize industries. Our commitment to AI infrastructure and models has positioned us at the cutting edge of this AI revolution. It's gratifying to see that over 60% of funded generative AI startups, and nearly 90% of gen AI unicorns, have chosen Google Cloud as their platform.

At this week's Cloud Next event, we're excited to showcase how we're bringing our decades of innovation and research to organizations globally. Our Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian, will provide an in-depth look at our latest announcements.

Here's a sneak peek at some of the highlights:

Expanding Access to Our Best AI Models in Vertex AI

In the past six months, we've rolled out our most advanced models yet, including Gemini 1.5 Pro. We're now making Gemini 1.5 Pro available in public preview for our Cloud customers and developers. This model boasts significantly improved performance and a breakthrough in long context understanding, capable of processing up to 1 million tokens consistently. This opens up a world of new possibilities for enterprises to innovate with AI.

When paired with Gemini’s multimodal capabilities, which handle audio, video, text, and code, this long context feature allows businesses to achieve feats previously unimaginable with AI. Imagine a gaming company offering detailed video analysis of player performance with improvement tips, or an insurance firm using video, images, and text to streamline incident reports and claims processing.

We're also broadening access to a new version of our open model Gemma, tailored for code generation and assistance. All these are now accessible through Vertex AI, Google Cloud’s platform for customizing and managing a variety of leading gen AI models. Currently, over 1 million developers are leveraging our generative AI tools, including AI Studio and Vertex AI. Additionally, through Vertex AI, customers can now enhance and ground their models using two new methods: Google Search, which boosts response accuracy with high-quality information, and their own data and sources of truth, such as enterprise applications like Workday or Salesforce and Google Cloud databases like BigQuery.

Building with Our AI Hypercomputer

The advances in generative AI hinge on robust infrastructure. Our AI Hypercomputer integrates our TPUs, GPUs, AI software, and more, offering unmatched performance and cost efficiency for training and deploying models. Leading AI companies and Google Cloud customers like Anthropic, AI21 Labs, Contextual AI, Essential AI, and Mistral AI are leveraging our infrastructure.

We're thrilled to announce the general availability of TPU v5p, our most powerful, scalable, and flexible AI accelerator for training and inference, boasting 4X the compute power of the previous generation.

Gemini for Cloud and Cybersecurity

We're rolling out new features that use AI to boost productivity, enhance coding efficiency, and tackle security threats more effectively.

Starting today, we're enhancing Gemini Code Assist to generate and test code more effectively. One standout feature is the integration of Gemini 1.5 Pro (in private preview), which, thanks to its larger context window, offers even more precise code suggestions and deeper insights.

We're also introducing more AI-driven tools to help organizations detect threats, summarize intelligence, and respond to attacks swiftly. Gemini in Threat Intelligence, currently in preview, uses natural language to provide deeper insights into threat actor behaviors. The larger context window of Gemini enables us to analyze much larger samples of potentially malicious code, yielding more accurate results.

Launching More AI-Powered Features in Google Workspace

We kicked off integrating generative AI into Google Workspace last year with "Help me write." Today, millions of users and businesses are tapping into Gemini for Google Workspace features across Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and more.

We're now rolling out further enhancements to Gemini for Google Workspace across Gmail, Meet, and Chat, and introducing Google Vids, an all-in-one video creation app for work that complements Docs, Sheets, and Slides.

How Customers Are Innovating

We're witnessing incredible innovation across various industries, from retail to transportation. Many customers are harnessing generative AI to develop agents that can process information in video, audio, or text formats. These agents assist with specific tasks like customer service or creative design, improving over time.

Mercedes-Benz, for instance, is integrating Google's AI in multiple ways, from enhancing their smart sales assistant to improving customer service in call centers and optimizing their website experience. We're eager to continue collaborating with Mercedes-Benz, especially as we work towards integrating Gemini models into their in-vehicle conversational system.

Another example is Uber, which is using AI agents to boost employee productivity, save time, and enhance effectiveness at work. For customer service representatives, they've introduced tools that summarize user communications and provide context from previous interactions, enabling front-line staff to offer better support.

We've been partnering with Palo Alto Networks since 2018 to address our customers' most complex security challenges. We're excited to embark on this next phase of AI innovation, combining our Gemini-powered capabilities with Palo Alto Networks' cybersecurity platforms to give security teams a near real-time advantage against attackers.

What's Next for Google Cloud

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg of how companies are leveraging Google Cloud, and hundreds more will share their stories at Cloud Next. I'm thrilled about the emerging innovation, the momentum we're seeing, and the deep partnerships Google Cloud is forging.

Just as cloud computing transformed business operations a decade ago, AI is poised to drive unprecedented opportunity and progress. Google Cloud is at the forefront of helping organizations worldwide achieve transformational feats, and we're eager to see what the future holds.