Google’s Cloud Next 2024 event takes place in Las Vegas through Thursday, and that means lots of new cloud-focused news on everything from Gemini, Google’s AI-powered chatbot, to AI to devops and security. Last year’s event was the first in-person Cloud Next since 2019, and Google took to the stage to show off its ongoing dedication to AI with its Duet AI for Gmail and many other debuts, expansion of generative AI to its security product line in addition to other enterprise-focused updates and debuts.
Don’t have time to catch the Google Cloud Next livestream? That’s OK; we’ve summed up the most important parts of the event below.
Google Vids
All of the major vendors have been looking at ways to use AI to help customers develop creative content. On Tuesday at the Google Cloud Next customer conference in Las Vegas, Google introduced a new AI-fueled video creation tool called Google Vids. The tool will become part of Google Workspace productivity suite when it’s released.
“I want to share something really entirely new. At Google Cloud Next, we’re unveiling Google Vids, a brand new, AI-powered video creation app for work,” Aparna Pappu, VP & GM at Google Workspace said, introducing the tool.
The idea is to provide a video creation tool alongside other Workspace tools like Docs and Sheets with a similar ability to create and collaborate in the browser, except in this case, on video. “This is your video editing, writing and production assistant, all-in-one,” Pappu said. “We help transform the assets you already have – whether marketing copy or images or whatever else in your drive – into a compelling video.”
Like other Google Workspace tools, you can collaborate with colleagues in real time in the browser. “No need to email files back and forth. You and your team can work on the story at the same time with all the same access controls and security that we provide for all of Workspace,” she said.
Examples of the kinds of videos people are creating with Google Vids include product pitches, training content or celebratory team videos. Like most generative AI tooling, Google Vids starts with a prompt. You enter a description of what you want the video to look like. You can then access files in your Google Drive or use stock content provided by Google and the AI goes to work, creating a storyboard of the video based on your ideas.
You can then reorder the different parts of the video, add transitions, select a template and insert an audio track where you record the audio or add a script and a preset voice will read it. Once you’re satisfied, you can generate the video. Along the way colleagues can comment or make changes, just as with any Google Workspace tool.
Google Vids is currently in limited testing. In June it will roll out to additional testers in Google Labs and will eventually be available for customers with Gemini for Workspace subscriptions
Vertex AI Agent Builder
We can all use a little bit of help, right? Meet Google’s Vertex AI Agent Builder, a new tool to help companies build AI agents.
“Vertex AI Agent Builder allows people to very easily and quickly build conversational agents,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said. “You can build and deploy production-ready, generative AI-powered conversational agents and instruct and guide them the same way that you do humans to improve the quality and correctness of answers from models.”
To do this, the company uses a process called “grounding,” where the answers are tied to something considered to be a reliable source. In this case, it’s relying on Google Search (which in reality could or could not be accurate).
Gemini comes to databases
At its annual Cloud Next conference in Last Vegas, Google announced the public preview of Gemini in Databases, a collection of features underpinned by Gemini to — as the company pitched it – “simplify all aspects of the database journey.” In less jargony language, Gemini in Databases is a bundle of AI-powered, developer-focused tools for Google Cloud customers who are creating, monitoring and migrating app databases.
One piece of Gemini in Databases is Database Studio, an editor for structured query language (SQL), the language used to store and process data in relational databases. Built into the Google Cloud console, Database Studio can generate, summarize and fix certain errors with SQL code, Google says, in addition to offering general SQL coding suggestions through a chatbot-like interface.
Joining Database Studio under the Gemini in Databases brand umbrella is AI-assisted migrations via Google’s existing Database Migration Service. Google’s Gemini models can convert database code and deliver explanations of those changes along with recommendations, according to Google.
Elsewhere, in Google’s new Database Center — yet another Gemini in Databases component — users can interact with databases using natural language, and manage a fleet of databases with tools to assess their availability, security and privacy compliance. And should something go wrong, those users can ask a Gemini-powered bot to offer troubleshooting tips.
“Gemini in Databases enables customer to easily generate SQL; additionally, they can now manage, optimize and govern entire fleets of databases from a single pane of glass; and finally, accelerate database migrations with AI-assisted code conversions,” Andi Gutmans, GM of databases at Google Cloud, wrote in a blog post shared with TechCrunch. “Imagine being able to ask questions like ‘Which of my production databases in east Asia had missing backups in the last 24 hours?’ or ‘Wow many PostgreSQL resources have a version higher than 11?’ and getting instant insights about your entire database fleet.”
Security tools get some AI love
At its annual Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas, Google on Tuesday introduced new cloud-based security products and services — in addition to updates to existing products and services — aimed at customers managing large, multi-tenant corporate networks.
Many of the announcements had to do with Gemini, Google’s flagship family of generative AI models.
For example, Google unveiled Gemini in Threat Intelligence, a new Gemini-powered component of the company’s Mandiant cybersecurity platform. Now in public preview, Gemini in Threat Intelligence can analyze large portions of potentially malicious code and let users perform natural language searches for ongoing threats or indicators of compromise, as well as summarize open-source intelligence reports from around the web.
“Gemini in Threat Intelligence now offers conversational search across Mandiant’s vast and growing repository of threat intelligence directly from frontline investigations,” Sunil Potti, GM of cloud security at Google, wrote in a blog post shared with TechCrunch. “Gemini will navigate users to the most relevant pages in the integrated platform for deeper investigation … Plus, [Google’s malware detection service] VirusTotal now automatically ingests OSINT reports, which Gemini summarizes directly in the platform.”
Gemini Code Assist
At its Cloud Next conference, Google on Tuesday unveiled Gemini Code Assist, its enterprise-focused AI code completion and assistance tool.
If this sounds familiar, that’s likely because Google previously offered a similar service under the now-defunct Duet AI branding. That one became generally available in late 2023, but even then, Google already hinted that it would move the service away from its Codey model to Gemini in the near future. Code Assist is both a rebrand of the older service as well as a major update.
Code Assist will be available through plug-ins for popular editors like VS Code and JetBrains.
Even more so than the Duet AI version, Code Assist is also a direct competitor to GitHub’s Copilot Enterprise and not so much the basic version of Copilot. That’s because of a few Google-specific twists.
Among those is support for Gemini 1.5 Pro, which famously has a million-token context window, allowing Google’s tool to pull in a lot more context than its competitors. Google says this means more-accurate code suggestions, for example, but also the ability to reason over and change large chunks of code.
Nvidia’s Blackwell platform
It’s Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas this week, and that means it’s time for a bunch of new instance types and accelerators to hit the Google Cloud Platform. In addition to the new custom Arm-based Axion chips, most of this year’s announcements are about AI accelerators, whether built by Google itself or from Nvidia.
Only a few weeks ago, Nvidia announced its Blackwell platform. But don’t expect Google to offer those machines anytime soon. Support for the high-performance Nvidia HGX B200 for AI and HPC workloads and GB200 NBL72 for large language model (LLM) training will arrive in early 2025. One interesting nugget from Google’s announcement: The GB200 servers will be liquid-cooled.
This may sound like a bit of a premature announcement, but Nvidia itself said that its Blackwell chips won’t be publicly available until the last quarter of this year.