Google says Gemini AI model enterprise-ready after mishaps
Google unveiled a host of updates to its artificial intelligence offerings for cloud computing customers, emphasizing 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, Cloud chief executive 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. The company also touted a new chip designed to handle the massive AI workloads and control the associated rising costs.
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 with Bloomberg ahead of the announcements. “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.”
Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., trails Amazon 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 the general public, Google and its cloud competitors see 2024 as the year the technology conquers the corporate world.
Much of the battle for AI superiority relies on having powerful semiconductors that are able to handle all the data being processed. Google is following Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft in designing its own microprocessors using technology from UK-based chip designer Arm Holdings Plc. The company announced Tuesday that it would roll out a new central processing unit, called Axion, that’s built with data centers in mind. Google said the chip will perform better and be more energy efficient than existing models. Kurian called the technology “a major new advance.”
Google has been developing its own custom silicon since 2015. But Axion represents Google’s aim to control its own destiny in semiconductors and reduce dependence on third-party vendors. The move further narrows the opportunity for its traditional chip providers — Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. — and adds to Arm’s foothold in the lucrative data center market. Google also announced that it would deepen its partnership with Nvidia Corp., which has established a commanding lead in AI chips.
Google’s chief rival in artificial intelligence, the Microsoftbacked startup 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 artificial intelligence 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 criticized after it spit out historically inaccurate images. CEO Sundar Pichai blasted the responses as “completely unacceptable,” and the Mountain View, Calif.-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.