A few months after generative AI burst into the public consciousness via ChatGPT, Google Cloud is unleashing a broad portfolio of powerful tools to bring the extraordinary power of generative AI to developers, businesses large and small, and the public sector.
Google Cloud, along with every Cloud Wars Top 10 company, is racing to deliver extensible tools and services to help customers begin leveraging — quickly, easily, and securely — the head-spinning power and potential of generative AI.
A couple of years from now, I believe we’ll all look back at this period in early 2023 as one of those stunning blink-of-an-eye transitions that transform, forever, our conceptions of what’s possible and impossible, the role of enterprise technology in our personal and business lives, and even the definition of “creativity.”
Now, having said that, I don’t mean to lead us astray into the brambles of existentialism, but what we are seeing from Google Cloud and others is that the mind-bending potential and impact of ChatGPT that we’ve all seen over the past few months is only a fleeting glimpse of what we can expect to experience in the nascent Generative AI revolution.
In that context, Google Cloud is looking to give many more people the ability to simply and securely create generative AI solutions and outcomes. I get the sense that Google Cloud is shifting an enormous amount of resources into this initiative and will be likely to continue to do so throughout this pivotal year.
From Google Cloud’s big generative AI product rollout yesterday, here are some key points from CEO Thomas Kurian:
- Vast range of opportunities: “We’re so excited by the potential of generative AI, and the opportunities it will unlock — from helping people express themselves creatively, to helping developers build brand new types of applications, to transforming how business and governments engage their customers and constituents. Stay tuned for more to come in the weeks and months ahead.”
- “Making AI accessible to everyone”: “Google has been investing in AI for many years and bringing its benefits to individuals, businesses, and communities … We’re now at a pivotal moment in our AI journey. Breakthroughs in generative AI are fundamentally changing how people interact with technology.”
- Easy, safe, scalable: “Developers and businesses can now try new APIs and products that make it easy, safe, and scalable to start building with Google’s best AI models through Google Cloud and a new prototyping called MakerSuite.”
- Cloud is the perfect delivery vehicle for the generative AI revolution: “We’re bringing new generative AI capabilities to our Google Cloud AI portfolio to help developers and organizations access enterprise-level safety, security, and privacy, as well as integrate with their existing cloud solutions.” Those advancements include Generative AI support in Vertex AI; Generative AI App Builder; and new AI partnerships and programs to expand the ecosystem with technology partners, AI-focused software providers, and startups.
- The need for speed: Kurian said Generative AI App Builder is “helping companies build generative AI applications in minutes or hours.”
Final Thought
While this first big wave of generative AI tools, technologies, and solutions from Google Cloud is impressive in its ambition, its end-to-end approach, and its capabilities, it is still very early days in the Generative AI Revolution. As Kurian himself says above, “Stay tuned for more to come in the weeks and months ahead.”
But this is not a matter of releasing a set of refinements for an existing product set or pushing out some innovative upgrades to cloud services.
No, what’s impressive here is Google Cloud’s realization, expressed unmistakably in Kurian’s vision as well as his words, that as the world approaches a time of truly remarkable change and innovation and their unruly friend called disruption, business customers can’t look at this as a five year or even three-year project to evaluate, assess, debate, tinker with, and dither over.
This is the equivalent of a land grab across industries that will be won by those companies that openly and eagerly embrace the power of generative AI and its elegant helical interplay with the cloud. And Google Cloud is taking a big first step to give customers the ability to go from wondering what this generative AI thing is all about to putting it to work in a near-endless variety of ways and becoming able to do things never before possible.
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