Over half of CEOs globally are experimenting with AI to generate text, images and other forms of data, a recent joint survey by Fortune and Deloitte found. Meanwhile, a third of organizations are using generative AI “regularly” in at least one business function, a McKinsey report shows.
Given the massive (and apparently growing) addressable market, it comes as no surprise that Google Cloud is pushing hard — very hard — to stay abreast.
During its annual Cloud Next conference, Google announced updates to Vertex AI, its cloud-based platform that provides workflows for building, training and deploying machine learning models. Vertex AI now features updated AI models for text, image and code generation, as well as new third-party models from startups including Anthropic and Meta and extensions that let developers incorporate company data and take action on a user’s behalf.“[With Vertex,] we’re taking a very open ecosystem approach, working with broad ecosystem partners to provide choice and flexibility to our customers,” June Yang, VP of cloud AI and industry solutions at Google, said in a press briefing. “We’ve built an approach to generative AI with enterprise readiness at its core, with a strong focus around data governance, responsible AI security and more.”
On the model side, Google claims that it’s “significantly” upgraded its Codey code-generating model, delivering a 25% quality improvement in “major supported languages” for code generation. (Google didn’t expand on that vague metric in the materials this reporter was given, unfortunately.) It’s also updated Imagen, its image-generating model, to improve the quality of generated images and support Style Tuning, which allows customers to create images “aligned to their brand” using as few as 10 reference images.
