Google says its AI is ready for business

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. Google’s chief rival in AI, the Microsoft- backed start- up OpenAI, is also courting corporate customers

“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. 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. 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.— Julia Love and Davey Alba, ( c) 2024 Bloomberg LP