Google Cloud CEO announces new capabilities, advanced chips for AI era

NEW DELHI — Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian on Tuesday announced several new capabilities and solutions in the AI era to drive customer success and momentum, including custom silicon advancements, Google Axion which is the company’s first custom Arm-based CPU designed for the data centres, and Gemini 1.5 Pro.

Gemini 1.5 Pro offers two sizes of context windows – 128,000 tokens and 1 million tokens, and is now available in public preview.

“In addition, we are announcing the ability to process audio files including videos with audio. Customers can process vast amounts of information in a single stream including 1 hour of video, 11 hours of audio, codebases with over 30,000 lines of code, or over 700,000 words,” Kurian said as the company organised its ‘Google Cloud Next’ event in the US.

The company also enabled “AI anywhere” through Google Distributed Cloud (GDC), allowing the users to choose the environment, configuration, and controls that best suit their organisation’s specific needs.

Kurian said that ‘Google Axion’ delivers up to 50 per cent better performance and up to 60 per cent better energy efficiency than comparable current-generation x86-based instances.

“Vertex AI, our enterprise AI platform, sits on top of our world-class infrastructure. It is the only unified platform that lets customers discover, customize, augment, deploy, and manage gen AI models,” he informed.

The company is offering more than 130 models, including the latest versions of Gemini, partner models like Claude 3, and popular open models including Gemma, Llama 2, and Mistral.

“Powered by Google DeepMind’s SynthID, we are proud to announce it is generally available today for AI-generated images produced by Imagen 2.0,” said the company.