Google Is Rolling Out More AI Features for Customers on the Cloud

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Google announced a raft of new artificial intelligence-powered features for customers of its cloud-computing business, as the technology giant jostles for dominance in the burgeoning field with rivals such as Microsoft Corp. and startup OpenAI.

As Silicon Valley buzzes about so-called generative AI — software that can create images, text and video based on user prompts — Google Cloud offered a glimpse of what it's doing to keep up in the race. In a demonstration, the company showed how cloud customers will be able to use its AI tools to create presentations and sales-training documents, take notes during meetings and draft emails to colleagues. The company also made some of its underlying AI models available to developers so they can build their own applications using Google's technology.

Alphabet Inc.-owned Google also said Tuesday it had signed up a flurry of AI startups as customers for its cloud service, including Midjourney, which offers an image-generation system, and AI21, which specializes in technology known as large language models. Google is offering young AI-focused businesses $250,000 in free use of its cloud — which provides computing horsepower and storage — for the first year, which the company said is 2 1/2 times what it typically offers.

“We believe in having a broad, vibrant partner ecosystem for AI,” Thomas Kurian, chief executive officer of Google Cloud, said in an interview.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai declared Google an AI-first company years ago, but the tech giant has been scrambling to reassert its leadership in the industry since OpenAI released its viral chatbot, called ChatGPT, in late November. As part of a “code red” decree inside the company, senior management told staffers that all of its most