Google's Major Announcements at Google Cloud Next 2024

Hello Everyone,

I pride myself in covering BigTech AI and announcements among the full spectrum of my emerging tech coverage.

Google has to be among the worst companies at marketing their Generative AI products. Google’s Cloud Next 2024 event took place in Las Vegas through Thursday, April 9th to 11th, and few people even knew it was happening. However people interested in AI should at least have an overview of these announcements.

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Biggest Google Cloud Next announcement was Vertex AI Agent Builder

The thing is they actually announced some interesting things for the future of AI and Agent building.

Vertex AI Agent Builder

Read their blog for more details on this. Agentic AI speaks to the focus on more automation and Enterprise AI functionality that will challenge RPA.

Vertex AI Agent Builder offers developers a suite of tools to construct and deploy AI applications ready for enterprise use, catering to a wide spectrum of expertise levels — from those preferring no-code options to others who might utilize open-source frameworks like LangChain.

Google Empowers Agentic AI

On Tuesday at Google Cloud Next, the company introduced a new tool to help companies build AI agents.

“Vertex AI Agent Builder allows people to very easily and quickly build conversational agents,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said.

This impacted Google’s stock last week in a big way as well. GOOGL 0.00%↑ ‘s stock is now up nearly 15% so far in 2024.

• The no-code product builds upon Google’s Vertex AI Search and Conversation product released previously.
• It’s also built on top of the company’s latest Gemini large language models and relies both on RAG APIs and vector search, two popular methods used industry-wide to reduce hallucinations, where models make up incorrect answers when they can’t find an accurate response.

Gemini Code Assist

Google keeps changing the name of its products, which is also super confusing. For the record, Gemini Code Assist, formerly Duet AI for Developers, is an AI-powered collaborator that helps your development team build, deploy, and operate applications.

Google Cloud Next Keynote in 14 Minutes

See the video go here.

Google’s copy on its own event doesn’t make it easy to understand what they actually have announced. While you can never trust a Google demo for a product, the AI Agent builder sounds like a step in the right direction.

Google Vids

Google Vids is a new app that helps you easily share ideas and create rich video content. Coming soon to Gemini for Google Workspace.

Imagen 2

Imagen 2, which is a suite of models rather than a single tool, has been designed to create and edit images based on text prompts. This tool is now available on Google's Vertex AI developer platform, marking a significant step forward in the realm of AI-driven content creation.

Learn More

Gemini in Databases

Now we’re getting somewhere. Gemini in Databases, which is part of Gemini for Google Cloud, is an AI-powered database assistant that helps you optimize your database fleet and work with the data in your databases.

See the features and breakdown. Read more.

” 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. - TechCrunch

Nvidia’s Blackwell platform

One of the anticipated announcements is Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell platform coming to Google Cloud in early 2025.

Support for the high-performance Nvidia HGX B200 for AI and HPC workloads and GB200 NBL72 for large language model (LLM) training. Also the GB200 servers will be liquid-cooled.

Gemini 1.5 Pro

Now available in 180+ countries. Go here to learn more.

Gemini 1.5 Pro is an embodiment of Google's latest advancements in AI. It underscores the company's commitment to pushing the boundaries of technology. It equips developers with enhanced tools and capabilities, empowering innovation. With this model, Google aims to drive meaningful progress in AI-driven applications.

Google Cloud Next Developer Keynote

Google Cloud Next 2024 Announcements

The question remains can Google’s AI products attract more customers to Google Cloud?

• Our AI Hypercomputer, a supercomputing architecture that employs an integrated system of performance-optimized hardware, open software, leading ML frameworks, and flexible consumption models;
• Our foundation models, including Gemini models, which process multi-modal information, and have advanced reasoning skills;?
• Our Vertex AI platform, which helps organizations and partners to access, tune, augment, and deploy custom models and connect them with enterprise data, systems and processes to roll out generative AI agents;
• Gemini for Google Cloud, which provides AI assistance to help users work and code more efficiently, manage their applications, gain deeper data insights, identify and resolve security threats, and more;
• Gemini for Workspace, which is the agent built right into Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and more, with enterprise-grade security and privacy; and
• A number of announcements across analytics, databases, cybersecurity, compute, networking, Google Workspace, our growing AI ecosystem, and more.

Read the Recap Blog

Google’s AI Optimized Stack & Infrastructure

• A3 Mega: Developed with NVIDIA using H100 Tensor Core GPUs, this new GPU-based instance will be generally available next month and delivers twice the bandwidth per GPU compared to A3 instances, to support the most demanding workloads. We are also announcing Confidential A3, which enables customers to better protect the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive data and AI workloads during training and inferencing.?
• NVIDIA HGX B200 and NVIDIA GB200 NVL72: The latest NVIDIA Blackwell platform will be coming to Google Cloud in early 2025 in two variations: the HGX B200 and the GB200 NVL72. The HGX B200 is designed for the most demanding AI, data analytics, and HPC workloads, while the GB200 NVL72 powers real-time large language model inference and massive-scale training performance for trillion-parameter- scale models.
• TPU v5p: We’re announcing the general availability of TPU v5p, our most powerful, scalable, and flexible AI accelerator for training and inference, with 4X the compute power per pod compared to our previous generation. We’re also announcing availability of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) support for TPU v5p. Over the past year, the use of GPUs and TPUs on GKE has grown more than 900%.??
• AI-optimized storage options: We’re accelerating training speed with new caching features in Cloud Storage FUSE and Parallelstore, which keep data closer to a customer’s TPU or GPU. We’re also introducing Hyperdisk ML (in preview), our next generation block storage service that accelerates model load times up to 3.7X compared to common alternatives.

• New options for Dynamic Workload Scheduler: Calendar mode for start time assurance and flex start for optimized economics will help customers ensure efficient resource management for the distribution of complex training and inferencing jobs.?

Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) Upgrades

• NVIDIA GPUs to GDC: We are bringing NVIDIA GPUs to GDC for both connected and air-gapped configurations. Each of these will support new GPU-based instances to run AI models efficiently.
• GKE on GDC: The same GKE technology that leading AI companies are using on Google Cloud will be available in GDC.?
• Support AI models: We are validating a variety of open AI models, including Gemma, Llama 2 and more on GDC to run in air-gapped and connected edge environments.
• AlloyDB Omni for Vector Search: We are also bringing the power of AlloyDB Omni for Vector Search to allow search and information retrieval on GDC for your private and sensitive data with extremely low latency.?
• Sovereign Cloud: For the most stringent regulatory requirements, we deliver GDC in a fully air-gapped configuration with local operations, full survivability, managed by Google or through a partner of your choice. You have complete control, and when regulations change, we have the flexibility to help you respond quickly.?

You’d have to be a serious fan of Google to even understand all the announcements made at Google Cloud Next 2024.

But that’s not even all.

Open source tools

At Google Cloud Next 2024, the company debuted a number of open source tools primarily aimed at supporting generative AI projects and infrastructure. One is Max Diffusion, which is a collection of reference implementations of various diffusion models that run on XLA, or Accelerated Linear Algebra, devices. Then there is JetStream, a new engine to run generative AI models. The third is MaxTest, a collection of text-generating AI models targeting TPUs and Nvidia GPUs in the cloud.

• MaxDiffusion
• JetStream
• MaxTest

The entire Google Cloud Next keynote

If you are serious in understanding all of this, watch the full keynote. It may give you a better idea of everything.

Go the long video here.