Cloud Next 2024: More momentum with generative AI

Google was built in the cloud. Over the last several years, we’ve focused on growing our Cloud business to bring the best of our tools, breakthroughs and compute infrastructure to help others build and transform their businesses.

We’ve seen incredible momentum in the Cloud business since then. In Q4, Cloud was at a $36 billion annual revenue run rate — that’s five times our run-rate five years ago.

One of the reasons Cloud is showing so much progress is our deep investments in AI. We’ve known for a while that AI will be the next technology to transform companies. Our investments in AI infrastructure and models help put us at the forefront of the AI platform shift. And we’re proud that today more than 60% of funded generative AI startups, and nearly 90% of gen AI unicorns are Google Cloud customers.

This week at Cloud Next, we’re sharing more ways we’re bringing our decades of innovation and research to organizations around the world. Our CEO of Google Cloud, Thomas Kurian, has a detailed overview of everything we’re announcing.

Here are some of the highlights:

Expanding access to our best AI models in Vertex AI

Over the last six months, we’ve launched our most capable models yet, including Gemini 1.5 Pro, and today we’re taking Gemini 1.5 Pro into public preview for our Cloud customers and developers. Gemini 1.5 Pro shows dramatically enhanced performance, and includes a breakthrough in long context understanding. That means it can run 1 million tokens of information consistently, opening up new possibilities for enterprises to create, discover and build using AI.

When combined with Gemini’s multimodal capabilities (which can process audio, video, text, code and more), long context enables enterprises to do things that just weren’t possible with AI before. For example, a gaming company could provide a video analysis of a player’s performance, along with tips to improve. Or an insurance company could combine video, images and text inputs to create an incident report, making the claims process easier.

We’re also expanding access to a new version of our open model Gemma, designed to help customers with code generation and other types of code assistance.

These are now available on Vertex AI, which is Google Cloud’s platform to customize and fully manage a wide range of leading gen AI models. Today more than 1 million developers are now using our generative AI across tools including AI Studio and Vertex AI. Additionally, through Vertex AI, customers now can augment and ground their models — connecting model outputs to verifiable sources of information — in two new ways. The first is with Google Search, which provides high quality information to improve the accuracy of responses. The second is with your own data and sources of truth, such as enterprise applications like Workday or Salesforce and Google Cloud databases like BigQuery.

Building with our AI Hypercomputer

Generative AI advances require strong underlying infrastructure. Our AI Hypercomputer combines our TPUs, GPUs, AI software and more to provide performance and cost advantages for training and serving models. Today, leading AI companies and Google Cloud customers like Anthropic, AI21 Labs, Contextual AI, Essential AI and Mistral AI are using our infrastructure.

And now we’re announcing the general availability of TPU v5p, our most powerful, scalable and flexible AI accelerator for training and inference, with 4X the compute power of our previous generation.

Gemini for Cloud and cybersecurity

We’re introducing new features that provide AI assistance to help customers work and code more efficiently, identify and resolve security threats, and more.

Starting today, we’re upgrading Gemini Code Assist, which can generate and test code. One of the most exciting is the addition of Gemini 1.5 Pro (in private preview) — with the larger context window, it can deliver even more accurate code suggestions and deeper insights.

We’re also providing more AI-driven tools to help organizations spot threats, summarize 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. Gemini’s larger context window enables us to analyze much larger samples of potentially malicious code and get more accurate results.

Launching more AI-powered features in Google Workspace

We started to bring generative AI features to Google Workspace last year with “Help me write.” Today millions of people and businesses are using Gemini for Google Workspace features across Gmail, Docs, Sheets and more.

We're now adding more enhancements to Gemini for Google Workspace across Gmail, Meet and Chat, and introducing Google Vids, an all-in-one video creation app for work that will sit alongside Docs, Sheets and Slides.

How customers are innovating

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. These agents can help with specific tasks — like customer service or creative design, while learning and improving over time.

Mercedes-Benz is applying Google’s AI in a number of ways, from their smart sales assistant to improving customer service in call centers, to optimizing 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.

Another example is Uber, which is using AI agents to help employees be more productive, save time, and be even more effective at work. For customer service representatives, they’ve launched new tools that summarize communications with users, and surface context from previous interactions, so front-line staff can be more helpful and effective.

We’ve partnered with Palo Alto Networks since 2018 to solve our customers’ most complex security challenges. We are excited to work together on this next phase of AI innovation, using our Gemini-powered capabilities and Palo Alto Networks cybersecurity platforms to give security teams an advantage against attackers in near real-time.

What’s next for Google Cloud

These are just a few examples of how companies are partnering with Cloud, and hundreds more will share their stories at Cloud Next. I’m excited by the innovation that's emerging, the momentum we’re seeing and the deep partnerships Google Cloud is building.

Just as cloud computing changed how businesses worked a decade ago, AI is going to drive incredible opportunity and progress all over again. Google Cloud is how we’ll continue to help organizations everywhere do transformational things, and we can’t wait to see what’s next.