Google offers enhanced generative AI features for cloud customers

Alphabet Inc.’s Google announced a slate of upgraded artificial intelligence features for its cloud-computing clients as the technology giant tries to catch up with rivals, including the allied forces of Microsoft Corp. and startup OpenAI, who have taken advantage of the AI boom.

The company on Wednesday unveiled Gemini Pro for enterprises, allowing developers to build applications using Google’s latest AI model, which was announced last week. Gemini is a large-scale AI system trained on vast amounts of data that can generate new content based on what users request.

Google Cloud clients can use Gemini to create apps such as AI-powered chatbots, easy-to-query inventory databases and marketing presentations. The company also emphasized that Gemini Pro will be free at launch for cloud customers, with some limits. Ultimately,

Google said, it plans to ensure that its cloud AI offering will be “competitively priced.” The company said Gemini Pro’s text-based capabilities are four times less expensive for input and two times less expensive for output than the last iteration of its AI model, PaLM 2, which was released in June.

The AI model is built to “generalize and seamlessly understand, operate across, and combine different types of information, including text, code, audio, image, and video in the same way that humans see, hear, read, listen and talk about different types of information simultaneously,” Google Cloud Chief Executive Officer Thomas Kurian said.

Though Google is a pioneer of generative AI, its products have lagged behind in popularity. Last week, Google aimed to counter that narrative with the release of Gemini, which has three sizes: Ultra, Pro and Nano. The company has begun rolling out Nano, the smallest version, which runs directly on devices like Google’s flagship smartphone, the Pixel 8 Pro. It has also released a specially designed version of Gemini Pro in Bard, Google’s AI chatbot and answer to OpenAI’s wildly popular app, ChatGPT. With the release of Gemini Pro to app developers and businesses, Google wants to send the message that it is no longer trailing OpenAI and the startup’s latest AI system, GPT-4, which is available through partner Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing platform.