As reported by Reuters, among the announcements made, notable mentions included additional clients adopting Google's cloud software, with companies like General Motors and Estee Lauder Companies joining as new customers.

The Alphabet subsidiary made public a new version of its custom-built AI chips, and unveiled an enterprise-scale tool to watermark and identify images generated with AI - plus tools for security and its office suite.

The flurry of announcements is part of Google's recent effort to showcase its AI plans, after Microsoft caught the company off guard with an ambitious AI strategy it has been rolling out since last year.

But its big business customers need to be deliberate and move at a different pace, Google Cloud chief Thomas Kurian said in an interview with Reuters.

"We've generally told enterprise customers, 'Go slowly and methodically because it's important that you treat this as a strategic software development,'" he said. "There's been this sort of FOMO of, 'I need to be in generative AI for generative AI's sake.'"

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FOMO refers to fear of missing out, a common refrain in AI in recent months.

To bolster Google's enterprise cloud service it added 20 AI models to its collection, bringing the total to 100. The AI infrastructure includes deals to bring Google Cloud customers access to Meta Platforms' AI model LLaMa 2, and to the startup Anthropic's Claude 2.

Google announced new versions of its own foundation AI infrastructure that improve performance and add features. The new version of its text model called PaLM, for example, increased the amount of text users can input to make it easier to process longer documents such as legal briefs and books.

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Google discussed a tool that adds the capability to watermark AI-generated images. Called SynthID, the technology alters a digital image file in a way invisible to human eyes. It is designed to remain intact after an image is altered or tampered with.

Google also rolled out AI updates to its suite of office software and security tools. The company unveiled an AI-powered tool that can port databases from Oracle to an open-source version, a notoriously difficult task.

AI Chips

Google has granted early access to a specialized version of its upcoming fifth-generation tensor processing unit (TPU), known as TPU v5e. This variant is specifically tailored for optimizing the performance of AI models and extensive language models.

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Unlike the more powerful flagship fifth-generation AI chip that is yet to be formally introduced, TPU v5e is intended for both training large models and efficiently handling the output generated by these models.

While not as robust as the unreleased premier AI chip, Google has introduced the TPU v5e in configurations of 256 chips, collectively referred to as a "supercomputer." These chip groupings can be interconnected by cloud customers to address more intricate computational tasks.

(With inputs from Reuters)

Updated: 30 Aug 2023, 06:47 AM IST