Google Cloud Next 2024 – 3 days of revelations

Las Vegas is home to the big and the bold, which makes it the ideal location for Google to announce its latest developments in the rapidly changing world of GenAI, and we certainly didn’t leave disappointed. 

The world’s leading hyperscaler has clearly not been resting on its laurels and although it has only been eight months since the last Google Cloud Next the new product and service announcements came thick and fast. Here we focus on a handful of highlights. 

Gemini 1.5 Pro is the latest iteration of Google’s GenAI multimodal model. The capabilities it offers are a step-change in what has come before. It has the power to process vast amounts of information in one go — 1 hour of video, 11 hours of audio, 30,000 lines of code and over 700,000 words. This is made possible by the capacity to run 1 million tokens of context. For the uninitiated, a token is the smallest meaningful unit of text that a model can process and understand. For example, “unbreakable” might be tokenized as “un”, “break”, and “able”. 

To put this power into context, OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo model has a context length of 128,000 tokens. 

Imagen 2 is Google’s diffusion-based text-to-image generator. Type a description of an image you need, and Imagen 2 will create it for you. It’s not a stock image. It’s a photo-realistic image generated to your specification. Powered by DeepMind, Imagen 2 has been trained on higher-quality, image-description pairings and generates more detailed images that are better aligned with the semantics of people’s language prompts. 

Vertex AI Agent Builder. AI Agents are systems that process input information to help make decisions and translate those decisions into actions that will achieve a specific goal or objective. At Next 2024, Google announced six Agent Builders designed to assist different areas of business to become more effective — Customer Agents, Employee Agents, Creative Agents, Data Agents, Code Agents and Security Agents. As their names suggest, each of these agents have their own flavours, with the end goal to aid customer service, HR, creatives, developers and analysts to be more effective and more efficient. 

These were just some of the 218 announcements that Google made at Next 2024. If you want to delve deeper into the advances made by Google in a surprisingly short period of time, I recommend you read the event wrap-up (https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/google-cloud-next/google-cloud-next-2024-wrap-up). 

The DeeperThanBlue view 

These developments are clearly world changing. But are they accessible by all? Probably not yet, but they are worth monitoring. For us mere mortals, there is still plenty of tech from the Google stable (and those of our other partners) that is closer at hand and that will make a significant difference to our customers.  

Our role at DeeperThanBlue is to keep track of these developments while making realistic solutions available to our customers. However, the pace of change means that the groundbreaking announcements made at Google Cloud Next 2024 could be incorporated into business toolkits sooner rather than later. 

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