Google Cloud Next, Google's most important cloud conference, took place in Las Vegas from April 9 to 11. At the internal PCG watch party for the keynote, bets were placed in advance on how often the words "AI" and "Gemini" would be mentioned. Conclusion after the count: quite often. (The resolution with the exact number can be found at the end of the article 😉)
However, the focus was naturally on the specific innovations - not only in the area of AI, but also in other areas. We have summarized the most important announcements of Google Cloud Next 2024 for you:
Collaboration and Workspace
- Google Vids: As an integrated tool in Google Workspace, Vids offers an AI-supported solution for video creation. Users can generate videos using voice instructions. The tool uses existing resources such as text documents, images, and audio libraries as well as user instructions to automate the entire process from scripting to filming and editing. Google Vids in action.
- With Imagen 2.0, short, 4-second live images can now be created from text instructions. Imagen 2.0 on Vertex AI: Text-to-live image
- Gemini comes as a preview to Google Chat and offers an AI-controlled teammate that summarizes conversations, answers questions and much more.
- With the help of extensive language models, Gmail can now block an additional 20% more spam and evaluate 1,000 times more spam reported by users every day.
- Voice prompts and instant corrections in Gmail: Easily send emails on the go with voice typing in "Help me write", and turn notes into a full email with one click.
- Tabs in Docs (generally available in the coming weeks) allow you to organize information in a single document instead of linking multiple documents or searching Drive.
Development
- AI-powered application development with Gemini Code Assist: This uses the power of large language models to understand commands in natural language. Code Assist helps developers to write code, analyze existing code bases and optimize the code structure using simple instructions.
- Cloud Run Application Canvas - Generate, modify and deploy AI applications in Cloud Run, with integrations to Vertex AI so that generative APIs from Cloud Run services can be used with just a few clicks.
Vertex AI
- Gemini 1.5 Pro is now available as a public preview in Vertex AI, giving developers everywhere the world's largest context window.
- The new Vertex AI Agent Builder is a new tool that allows organizations to easily and quickly create AI agents. Developers can create and deploy AI experiences using natural language or open source frameworks like LangChain on Vertex AI.
Security
- Gemini in Threat Intelligence: can analyze large pieces of potentially malicious code. Users can also search for current threats or signs of compromise using natural language.
- Gemini in Security Command Center, which now allows security teams to preview and search for threats and other security events in natural language, and provides summaries of critical and high-priority misconfiguration and vulnerability alerts, as well as a summary of attack paths.
Data & BI
- The new BigQuery Data Canvas provides a notebook-like experience with embedded visualizations and natural language support thanks to Gemini.
- New BigQuery integrations with Gemini models in Vertex AI support multimodal analytics and vector embeddings, as well as fine-tuning of LLMs.
- BigQuery can now be used with Gemini 1.0 Pro Vision to analyze both images and video by combining custom prompts and SQL statements.
- BigQuery Continuous Queries provide continuous SQL processing over data streams, enabling real-time pipelines with AI operators or reverse ETL.
- BigQuery Studio offers a collaborative data workspace, the choice of SQL, Python, Spark or natural language directly, and new integrations for real-time streaming and governance.
- BigQuery can now connect models in Vertex AI to enterprise data without copying or moving data out of BigQuery.
- Gemini in BigQuery, enables data analysts to be more productive, improve query performance and optimize costs throughout the analytics lifecycle.
- Gemini in Looker provides a dedicated area in Looker to initiate a chat on any topic with your data and quickly gain insights.
Core infrastructure
- Google has expanded Google Cloud's compute portfolio with major product releases that include compute and storage for general purpose workloads as well as specialized workloads such as SAP and high performance databases.
- Google Axion is Google's first custom Arm-based CPU designed for the data center and will be available in preview in the coming months.
All innovations in the Google blog post
These were just a few highlights. Google has compiled a complete list of the 218 announcements for you here.
Conclusion
As was to be expected, Google Cloud Next 2024 was all about AI. Google offers innovative functions with AI support in almost all areas, enabling companies to become even more efficient, secure and innovative.
As mentioned at the beginning, the importance of AI for Google is also reflected in the keynote speech. After analyzing the tally list, we came up with the following values for the words AI and Google's AI solution Gemini: AI: 120 mentions = 2 AI per minute. Gemini: 65 mentions = 1 Gemini per minute. To be honest, less would have been a disappointment.