Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. Image: Eric Dietrich

Google has unveiled a host of updates to its artificial intelligence offerings for cloud computing customers, emphasising that the technology is safe and ready for use in the corporate realm, despite recent stumbles in consumer-facing tools.

At the company’s annual cloud computing conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian showed off how Google’s most powerful AI model, Gemini, can be used to create advertisements, ward off cybersecurity threats, and spin up short videos and podcasts.

Corporate customers will be able to peg Gemini’s query responses to reliable sources of information, known as grounding. The company is rolling out the use of Google search results as a source for the AI model’s answers, thereby providing greater accuracy and freshness, Kurian said.

“Enterprises have been piloting with us a number of scenarios with generative AI; now they’re deploying them in production,” Kurian said in an interview ahead of the announcements. “The capabilities to do things like grounding, improving correctness of answers — all of those, step by step, people have got comfortable, they’re seeing value, and they’re deploying as a result.”

Google, a unit of Alphabet, trails Amazon.com and Microsoft in cloud computing, but the market is one of the tech giant’s best bets for growth as its core search advertising business matures. Google reported the first full year of profitability at its cloud unit in 2023 and hopes to use its prowess in AI to close the gap with rivals. After OpenAI’s ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late 2022 and was quickly embraced by college students and the general public, Google and its cloud competitors see 2024 as the year the technology conquers the corporate world.

The race among the tech powerhouses is on. Google’s chief rival in AI, the Microsoft-backed start-up OpenAI, is also courting corporate customers. OpenAI now has more than 600 000 people signed up to use ChatGPT Enterprise, up from around 150 000 in January, chief operating officer Brad Lightcap said last week.

Consumer setbacks

Google’s enterprise push follows some embarrassing setbacks in the consumer market. In February, its flagship AI product Gemini, which ingests enormous volumes of digital media to train software that predicts and generates content in response to a prompt or query, was roundly criticised after it spit out historically inaccurate images. CEO Sundar Pichai blasted the responses as “completely unacceptable”, and the Mountain View, California-based company stopped accepting prompts for people in its image generator while it works to address the concerns.

Yet Kurian presented generative AI in the enterprise space as a very different story. Businesses can use Gemini to create images for advertising campaigns, but the pro tool comes with 19 different controls to help marketers ensure that the content is in keeping with their brand, Kurian said.

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Despite the fallout over the Gemini images, Google Cloud has continued to allow corporate customers to generate images of people using the enterprise version of the tool — and no customers have complained about the results, Kurian said.

“We had zero, zero issues with the reported issues that people had on the consumer side with Gemini for Workspace,” he said. “There was not a single customer affected by it because we have capability in our enterprise platform for the company to control various elements of factuality, safety, model safety, responsibility.”

Those controls will now be augmented by the ability for corporate clients to ground Gemini’s responses in Google search. When this feature is enabled, the AI model will produce citations for every sentence of its outputs, based on its retrieval of information from Google search results. In a demonstration on Friday, hours after an earthquake struck New Jersey, a Google employee showed how the default version of the model stated that there had been no recent earthquakes in the area; the version of the model grounded in Google search results correctly gave the magnitude of the temblor and said there had been no major reports of damage.

Corporate clients can also ground the model’s responses in their company’s data, or even a specific portion of an employee manual — in contrast to the consumer version of Gemini, which is more a one-size-fits-all tool.

Google Cloud’s app developer platform, called Vertex AI, is adding new features underpinned by Gemini 1.5 Pro, which Google has said has the “longest context window” of any large-scale AI model. Gemini 1.5 Pro can process up to a million “tokens” — essentially, words or pieces of words — at a time, according to the company, including audio. That means developers can ask the AI model for responses based on hundreds, or potentially thousands, of images, videos, documents and audio files.

In a demonstration, a Google Vertex AI product leader showed how Gemini 1.5 Pro works with Google Workspace. Cloud customers can upload marketing images and other media to Google Drive and ask the AI model to create new content such as a slideshow or a podcast based on a brand’s style. Users can also ask the AI model for “live images”, a four-second moving image showing a particular product within a scene. For example, Nenshad Bardoliwalla, the Vertex AI product leader, generated an image of a yellow camping tent against the backdrop of a gently babbling stream. Google said the images generated by its Vertex AI platform would include digital watermarks to signal they were generated by AI.

While last year Google touted how its AI tools could be used to complete everyday corporate tasks such as composing e-mail and marketing copy, this year the company extended their capabilities to include more behind-the-scenes work.

The company also rolled out a series of Gemini applications for cybersecurity, which Google says will help clients analyse threats and address potential vulnerabilities. The features build on Google’s US$5.4-billion acquisition of cybersecurity firm Mandiant in 2022. Google’s AI-powered security features can help companies be more proactive about combating bad actors, said Eric Doerr, vice president of cloud security engineering. “What otherwise would be very manual research tasks” can be aided by AI, he said.

Unicorns

Google was keen to point out how it works with the burgeoning crop of AI start-ups, which it sees as a key source of cloud business. Many of the most prominent young AI companies were founded by former Google employees, and they make for desirable clients given the tremendous amount of computing power they require.

Google Cloud has seen an increase in business from start-ups using its platform to build generative AI apps and services, Kurian said. More than 60% of generative AI start-ups that have raised funding are now paying for Google’s cloud computing services, Kurian said. Of those valued at more than $1-billion — colloquially referred to as “unicorns” — 90% are Google Cloud customers, up from 70% in August, he said. New clients include AssemblyAI, a company building AI models for transcription, and Writer, a start-up focused on custom generative AI apps like chatbots.

Competition for such clients is fierce, and many of the start-ups use multiple cloud providers. Amazon said more than 5 000 generative AI startups were customers of its AWS platform as of September.

Kurian said the product updates flowed from close collaboration between his cloud unit and Google DeepMind, the company’s premiere AI lab, led by Demis Hassabis. The lab was the product of the merger of two research groups last year, a move Google made to bring its full talent to bear in the intensifying AI race. Engineers from the cloud and research organisations work closely together — in some cases sitting side by side — to sharpen product focus, Kurian said.

“That collaboration is up and down the organisation,” Kurian said. “We’ve got a super-close working relationship in the Bay Area, in London, in Seattle with the DeepMind team.” — Julia Love and Davey Alba, (c) 2024 Bloomberg LP