Google unveils updated AI business products after embarrassing setbacks

In February, Gemini was roundly criticised after it offered up historically inaccurate images

Google’s most powerful AI model, Gemini, can be used to create advertisements, ward off cybersecurity threats and spin up short videos and podcasts.

Google unveiled a host of updates to its artificial intelligence offerings for cloud computing customers, emphasising that the technology is safe and ready for use in the corporate realm, despite recent stumbles in consumer-facing tools.

At the company’s annual cloud computing conference in Las Vegas, cloud chief executive Thomas Kurian showed off how Google’s most powerful AI model, Gemini, can be used to create advertisements, ward off cybersecurity threats and spin up short videos and podcasts.

Corporate customers will be able to peg Gemini’s query responses to reliable sources of information, known as grounding. The company is rolling out the use of Google search results as a source for the AI model’s answers, thereby providing greater accuracy and freshness, Kurian said.

“Enterprises have been piloting with us a number of scenarios with generative AI; now they’re deploying them in production,” Mr Kurian said. “The capabilities to do things like grounding, improving correctness of answers — all of those, step by step, people have gotten comfortable, they’re seeing value, and they’re deploying as a result," he said. 

Google, a unit of Alphabet, trails Amazon and Microsoft in cloud computing, but the market is one of the tech giant’s best bets for growth as its core search advertising business matures. The race among the tech powerhouses is on. 

Google’s chief rival in artificial intelligence, the Microsoft-backed start-up OpenAI, is also courting corporate customers. OpenAI now has more than 600,000 people signed up to use ChatGPT Enterprise, up from around 150,000 in January. 

Google’s corporate push follows some embarrassing setbacks in the consumer market. In February, its flagship artificial intelligence product Gemini, which ingests enormous volumes of digital media to train software that predicts and generates content in response to a prompt or query, was roundly criticised after it spit out historically inaccurate images. 

Group chief executive Sundar Pichai blasted the responses as “completely unacceptable,” and the company stopped accepting prompts for people in its image generator while it works to address the concerns. 

AI chips

Meanwhile, Intel is rolling out a new version of its artificial intelligence chip, aiming to challenge Nvidia in one of the fastest-growing parts of the semiconductor industry.

The updated processor, called Gaudi 3, will be widely available in the third quarter, Intel said at a company event. The chip is designed to boost performance in two key areas: Helping train AI systems — a process that involves bombarding them with data — and running the finished software. 

Booming demand for AI services has sent tech companies scrambling for these so-called accelerator chips, but Nvidia has seen most of the benefit.

Bloomberg