No better place than Las Vegas for Google to put a big bet on growing its cloud business.
What happened: Google’s Cloud Next conference began with a ton of AI announcements. New AI tools and faster chips are meant to entice business customers and get them using Google’s cloud, which the services run on.
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Axion is a custom-built CPU optimized for AI. Details are slim, but the company said (ambiguously) that the chips had 30% better performance than the current (unnamed) fastest chips, and 60% more energy efficiency.
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Imagen 2 is an updated version of its AI image generator tailored to businesses, which comes with the new ability to generate short videos.
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Workspace has several new tools, including writing emails for you or instantly translating video calls.
- Vertex, the company’s enterprise AI development platform, has been updated with the new 1.5 version of the Gemini Pro AI model, as well as an Agent Builder to create customer service bots without coding.
Why it matters: Google still trails Microsoft and Amazon in the cloud business, but as more businesses put AI pilots and tests into production, debuting more attractive tools now could propel future growth.
Yes, but: Gemini's well-publicized kinks might make AI a less attractive perk. But Google wants to put clients’ minds at ease by “grounding” AI responses in Google search, with more current info and citations to trusted sources.
What they’re saying: “The capabilities to do things like grounding, improving correctness of answers — all of those, step by step, people have gotten comfortable, they’re seeing value, and they’re deploying as a result,” Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, told Bloomberg.
Zoom out: Google had some non-AI things to show off, too. One of them was Vids, which you can think of as combining Slides with a video app for recording presentations.