Google Cloud Next 2024: Everything announced so far

Google’s Cloud Next 2024 event runs through Thursday in Las Vegas. That means a lot of new cloud-focused news from Google’s AI-powered chatbot, Gemini, on everything from AI to his DevOps and security. Last year’s event was the first in-person Cloud Next since 2019, and Google took to the stage with a number of debut products, including his Duet AI for Gmail and the expansion of generative AI into its security product line. He showcased his continued efforts in AI. More enterprise updates and debuts.

Don’t have time to see the full archive of Google’s keynote event? That’s okay; we’ve summarized the most important parts of the event below, with additional information from the TechCrunch team on-site. And Tuesday’s update wasn’t the only update Google provided to non-attendees. Wednesday’s developer-focused stream started at 10:30 a.m. PT.

Google video

Leveraging AI to help customers develop creative content is what big tech companies are looking for, and on Tuesday Google announced its version. Google Vids, a new AI-powered video creation tool, is the latest addition to Google Workspace.

Here’s how it works: Google claims that users can create videos alongside other Workspace tools such as Docs and Sheets. All editing, writing, and production is done here. You can also collaborate with colleagues in real time within Google Vids. read more

gemini code assist

After reading about Google’s new Gemini Code Assist, an AI code completion and assistance tool for enterprises, you might be asking yourself if this sounds familiar. And you would be right. “Google previously offered a similar service under the now-defunct Duet AI brand,” TechCrunch senior editor Frederic Lardinois wrote. Then along came Gemini. Code Assist is a direct competitor to GitHub’s Copilot Enterprise. The reason is as follows

And to put Gemini Code Assist in context, in the latest episode of TechCrunch Minute, Alex Wilhelm details the competition with Copilot and the potential risks and benefits for developers.

Google Workspace

Image credits: Google

Among the new features is a voice prompt to start Gmail’s AI-based “Help me write” feature on the go. Another method for Gmail includes a way to instantly turn a rough email draft into a more polished email. Spreadsheets can send customizable alerts when certain fields change. Meanwhile, a new set of templates makes it easy to start a new spreadsheet. For document lovers, tabs are now supported. According to the company, this is great because it allows you to “organize your information within a single document, rather than linking to multiple documents or searching in Drive.” Of course, subscribers receive the benefits first. read more

Google also appears to be planning to monetize two new AI features in its Google Workspace productivity suite. This would be like an add-on package for $10 per user per month. One is for a new AI meetings and messaging add-on that takes notes, provides meeting summaries, and translates content into 69 languages. the other one is, Introduced AI Security Package. This helps administrators keep Google Workspace content more secure. read more

imagen 2

In February, Google announced an image generator built into its AI-powered chatbot Gemini. The company reversed this action shortly after it was discovered that it was randomly incorporating gender and racial diversity into its people prompts. This resulted in some offensive inaccuracies. While waiting for the eventual re-release, Google announced Imagen 2, an improved image generation tool. It is within the Vertex AI developer platform and is enterprise-focused. Imagen 2 is now generally available and comes with some fun new features, including: In-paint and out-paint.There are times when Google calls it “text to live images.” Alongside AI-powered clip generation tools like , you can now create short 4-second videos from text prompts. Runway, pika and irreverent institute. read more

Vertex AI Agent Builder

We could all use a little help, right? Google’s Vertex AI Agent Builder is a new tool to help enterprises build AI agents.

“Vertex AI Agent Builder makes it incredibly easy and fast to build conversational agents,” said Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kuran. “By building and deploying production-ready conversational agents powered by generative AI that can be directed and guided like a human, we can improve the quality and accuracy of answers from our models. Masu.”

To do this, the company uses a process called “grounding,” which connects answers to information that it considers reliable sources. In this case, you’re relying on a Google search (which may or may not actually be accurate). read more

Gemini comes to the database

Google calls the collection of features that “simplify every aspect of databases” Gemini in Databases. In less jargon, it’s a bundle of AI-powered developer tools for Google Cloud customers who create, monitor, and migrate app databases. read more

Google puts renewed emphasis on data sovereignty

Image credits: Mirage C/Getty Images

Google has always offered cloud sovereignty, but now it’s focused on partnerships rather than building it in-house. read more

Security tools are loved by AI

Image credits: Getty Images

Google is commercializing AI-powered generative security tools with a host of new products and features for large enterprises. These include threat intelligence that can analyze a large portion of potentially malicious code. Users can also perform natural language searches to find signs of ongoing threats and compromises. Another is Chronicle, Google’s cybersecurity telemetry product for cloud customers that assists with cybersecurity investigations. The third is Security Command Center, an enterprise cybersecurity and risk management suite. read more

Nvidia’s Blackwell platform

One expected announcement is that Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell platform will be coming to Google Cloud in early 2025. Yes, that seems very far away. However, what you can expect here is support for the high-performance Nvidia HGX B200 for AI and HPC workloads and the GB200 NBL72 for large-scale language model (LLM) training. Oh, and it’s also revealed that the GB200 servers will be water-cooled. read more

Chrome Enterprise Premium

Meanwhile, Google is expanding its Chrome Enterprise product suite with the release of Chrome Enterprise Premium. What’s new here is that we’re primarily concerned with the security features of existing services, based on the insight that the browser is now the endpoint where most of the high-value work within the enterprise takes place. . read more

gemini 1.5 pro

Image credits: Google

Everyone can use “Half” from time to time, and Google requires that: Gemini 1.5 Pro. Kyle Wiggers wrote that it is “Google’s most capable generative AI model,” and it is currently available in public preview on Vertex AI, Google’s enterprise AI development platform. Here’s what you get for half of that: TThe amount of context that can be processed ranges from 128,000 tokens up to 1 million tokens. Here, a “token” refers to a subdivided bit of raw data (such as the syllables “fan”, “tas”, “tic” in the word “”). wonderful”). read more

open source tools

Image credits: Getty Images

At Google Cloud Next 2024, the company announced a number of open source tools primarily aimed at supporting generative AI projects and infrastructure. One is Max Diffusion, which is a collection of reference implementations of various diffusion models running on Accelerated Linear Algebra (XLA) devices. Then there’s JetStream, a new engine for running generative AI models. The third is MaxTest, a collection of text generation AI models targeting his TPUs and Nvidia GPUs in the cloud. read more

Axion

Image credits: Google

We don’t know much about this, but here’s what we do know. Google Cloud joins his AWS and Azure in announcing the first custom-built Arm processor called Axion. Frederic Lardinois writes: “Based on Arm’s Neoverse 2 design, Google says its Axion instances offer 30% better performance than other Arm-based instances from competitors such as AWS and Microsoft, and up to It says it offers 50% better performance and 60% better energy efficiency”-based instances. ” read more

Complete Google Cloud Next keynote

If that deluge of AI and cloud updates isn’t enough for you, you can watch the event’s keynote in its entirety in the embed below.

Google Cloud Next Developer Keynote

on wednesday, Google held another keynote for developers. They detailed many of the tools outlined in Tuesday’s keynote, including Gemini Cloud Assist, which uses AI for product recommendations and chat agents, and ended with a showcase of Hugging Face. The full text of the keynote speech can be viewed below.