Google Cloud Next 2024: Highlights From The Tech Giant's Conference

Tech giant Google recently announced a series of updates during its Cloud Next 2024 conference. The event concentrated on highlighting their Cloud business developments, shared the best tools, breakthroughs, and computing infrastructure that helped and transformed businesses.

Here are the highlights of the event:

In the last six months, the tech giant has launched several capable models like the Gemini 1.5 Pro and combined them with multi-modal capabilities. This combination makes it convenient for users to comprehend huge data across different forms such as text, code, video, audio, and others and leverage it.

For instance, a gaming company can acquire a player’s performance analysis and recommend tips to enhance their experience. On the other hand, an insurance company can comprehend the text, video, or audio of the incident, report and simplify the claim process.

Furthermore, the tech company is expanding its accessibility to the latest version of the open model Gemma, which is now available on Vertex AI, a Google Cloud platform.

The US tech giant announced the general availability of TPU v5p, their most powerful, scalable and flexible AI accelerator for training and inference. Google’s AI Hypercomputer combined TPUs, GPUs, AI software and more to provide performance and cost advantages for training and serving models.

Google has upgraded Gemini Code Assist and it can now generate and test code. The latest version can deliver accurate code suggestions and deeper insights in private preview. This will help customers work and code more efficiently, identify and resolve security threats, and more.

"We’re also providing more AI-driven tools to help organisations spot threats, summarise intelligence and take action against attacks. Gemini in Threat Intelligence, which is currently in preview, uses natural language to deliver deeper insights about how threat actors behave," said Google in its blog.

Gemini's larger context window is beneficial as it helps to analyse malicious code and generate accurate results.

Last year, the tech giant introduced the 'help me write' generative AI feature into Google Workspace. Today, millions of people and businesses use Gemini for Google Workspace across Gmail, documents, sheets and more.

The company is adding more enhancements to Gemini for Google Workspace across Gmail, Meet and Chat with Google Vids, an all-in-one video creation app for work that will sit alongside documents, sheets and slides.

"We’re seeing incredible customer momentum across every industry, including retail, transportation and so many others. Many customers are using generative AI to build agents that can process information in video, audio or text formats," said the Google blog.

They elaborated that Mercedes-Benz is leveraging Google’s AI in different ways from smart sales assistants to improved customer service in call centres and to optimise their website experience.

"Looking forward, we’re excited to collaborate with Mercedes-Benz as we work toward bringing Gemini models to their in-vehicle conversational system," Google said.

In yet another instance, they highlighted that Uber is leveraging AI agents to assist employees to be more productive, save time, and stay effective at work. They have launched new tools that can update customer service representatives with relevant customer details for effective and helpful interactions.

Google has partnered with Palo Alto Networks since 2018 to solve their customers’ most complex security challenges. The tech company stated that they were excited with the innovation that’s emerging, with the momentum they are seeing, and Google Cloud’s deep partnerships.

"Just as cloud computing changed how businesses worked a decade ago, AI is going to drive incredible opportunity and progress all over again," said Google.

They further added that they are keen to leverage Google Cloud to help organisations worldwide and do transformational things and are eager to see what’s in store for them.