Google Cloud Next 2024: Overview of all news and updates

Google Cloud Next 2024 is off to a strong start and we’ve already seen the company’s latest product launches, focusing on Generative AI, cloud news, development, and security.

At Plain Concepts, we didn’t want to miss any of the details and we’ve traveled to Las Vegas to follow everything that’s going to be announced during the event. Here’s a summary of the highlights!

Google Cloud Next 2024 Recap

The last Google Cloud Next took place just 8 months ago in San Francisco (the first in-person event since 2019), and since then, they have strived to continue to innovate in products and Workspace. They have expanded their infrastructure on a planetary scale to 40 regions, introduced new next-gen models, and generative AI has been in a new direction with the launch of Gemini.
The most important innovations announced during the 2024 event were as follows.

What’s new in the AI Hypercomputer architecture

Significant improvements were announced at every layer of the AI hypercomputer architecture. This systems-level approach combines performance-optimized hardware, open frameworks and software, and flexible consumption models to enable developers and businesses to be more productive, thanks to the overall system running with greater performance and efficiency:

• Performance-optimised hardware enhancements, including the general availability of Cloud TPU v5p and A3 Mega VM with NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU technology, with increased performance for large-scale training with enhanced networking capabilities.
• Storage portfolio optimizations for AI workloads, including Hyperdisk ML, a new block storage service optimized for AI inference/service workloads, and new caching capabilities in Cloud Storage FUSE and Parallelstore, which improve training and inference performance and latency.
• Advances in open software, such as the introduction of JetStream, a performance- and memory-optimized inference engine for large language models (LLMs) that delivers higher performance per dollar on open models such as Gemma 7B and JAX and PyTorch/XLA versions that improve performance on both. Cloud TPU and NVIDIA GPU.
• New flexible power options with Dynamic Workload Scheduler, such as calendar mode for guaranteed start time and flexible start mode for optimized economics.

Gemini 1.5 Pro

Now available in preview at Vertex AI, giving customers the power of the world’s first 1 million token contextual window. This breakthrough enables multi-modal reasoning natively on huge amounts of request-specific data.

It also supports the ability to process audio streams, including voice, as well as the audio portion of videos. This enables seamless cross-modal analysis that provides information on text, images, videos, and audio, such as using the model to transcribe, search, analyze, and answer questions in earnings calls or investor meetings.

Imagen 2.0

This tool is becoming a great ally for many businesses when it comes to generating high-quality, accurate images on an enterprise scale.

The current preview of live text-to-image conversion capabilities makes Imagen even more powerful for enterprise workloads. This allows creative and marketing teams to generate animated images, such as GIFs and more, from a text message.

It can generate a variety of camera angles and movements while supporting consistency throughout the sequence. And the image generation capability is also being upgraded with advanced photo editing features, including internal and external painting.

Vertex AI Agent Builder

To help customers manage the most common obstacles to deploying generative AI and accelerate the development of intelligent agents, they have announced Vertex AI Agent Builder, which brings together Vertex AI Search and Conversation products, along with a suite of enhanced developer tools.

It enables easy creation and deployment of enterprise-generation AI experiences through a range of tools for different developer needs and experience levels, from a codeless console for creating AI agents using natural language to open-source frameworks such as LlangChain in Vertex AI.

It also streamlines the process of connecting generative AI results to enterprise data. As well as creating production-level AI agents using natural language.

Powering Google Cloud with Gemini

Gemini for Google Cloud is a new generation of AI assistants for Google Cloud developers, services, and applications. It helps users work and code more effectively, gain deeper data insights, address security challenges, and more.

It also offers enterprise-ready AI capabilities that provide robust security, compliance, and privacy controls.

Gemini Cloud Assist

Helps cloud teams design, operate, and optimize the application lifecycle. It can accelerate complex tasks and increase productivity so users can stay focused on the business.

It offers capabilities such as:

• Goal-based design.
• Guided operations and troubleshooting.
• Custom optimizations.

Gemini in Security

They are adding Gemini in Security Operations to Chronicle to elevate the skills of security teams and boost their productivity, enabling them to detect, investigate, and respond to threats more easily.

They will add a new assisted investigation feature, which converts natural language into new detections, summarises event data, recommends actions, and guides users through the platform with conversational chat.

To this end, they are also introducing new AI capabilities:

• Gemini in Threat Intelligence: provides access to frontline threat intelligence through conversational search to gain insight into threat actor behavior in seconds.
• Gemini in Security Command Center: summarises critical and high-priority alerts for misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, as well as provides recommendations on how to close potential vulnerabilities in simulated attack paths, thus proactively mitigating risk.

Gemini Code Assist

This is the evolution of Duet AI for developers, now using the latest Gemini models. It offers AI-powered assistance to help developers build applications with greater speed and quality in popular code editors such as VS Code and JetBrains.

It is an enterprise coding support solution that supports private codebases from any location: local, GitLab, GitHub, Bitbucket, or multiple repositories. It enables organizations to adopt AI support at scale while meeting security, privacy, and compliance requirements.

New features introduced include full code base awareness, code customization, integration services, ecosystem enhancements, etc.

Gemini in BigQuery

It’s a game changer for data engineers and analysts, helping them to be more productive, improve query performance, and optimize costs throughout the entire analytics lifecycle, from ingest and pipeline creation to gaining valuable insights with AI-powered capabilities.

Gemini in BigQuery comes with a new data canvas that provides a new notebook-like experience with natural language support and integrated visualizations.

It also includes AI-augmented data preparation, which helps users cleanse and manage data, along with the ability to create low-code visual data pipelines. In addition to offering query recommendations, semantic search, low-code visual data pipeline development tools, and intelligent recommendations to improve query performance, minimize errors, and optimize costs.

Gemini in Looker

It offers users new ways to interact and chat with our business data. They are now launching a new conversational analytics offering that provides multi-turn capabilities to be able to ask questions about our data, as if to a business expert in chat.

It delivers insights in seconds, accelerating the ability to create crisp visualizations and reports, connect them to Workspace, and share them with the team without writing code.

Gemini in Databases

It offers AI-powered assistance that simplifies every aspect of the database journey, helping teams focus on what matters most.

You can now build applications faster using natural language; manage, optimize, and govern an entire fleet of databases from a single dashboard; and accelerate database migrations.

It also offers SQL generation and summarisation capabilities to Database Studio, speeding up the coding process based on best practices. In addition, you can interact with the chat interface to clarify questions and get help when needed.

Google Axion Processors

These are Google’s first custom CPUs, based on Arm® and designed for the data center. Axion delivers performance and power efficiency and will be available later this year.

They combine Google’s silicon expertise with Arm’s highest-performing CPU cores to deliver instances with up to 30% better performance than the fastest general-purpose Arm-based instances available in the cloud, up to 50% better performance, and up to 60% better energy efficiency than comparable current-generation x86-based instances.

They offer huge performance gains for general-purpose workloads such as web and application servers, containerized microservices, open source databases, in-memory caches, data analytics engines, media processing, and CPU-based.

Google Workspace

They wanted to go a step further to help teams get the most out of the tools they rely on every day:

Google Vids

The newest app in the suite, it allows you to create videos for work, powered by AI. You can generate a storyboard that can be easily edited, choose a style, and create a first draft with suggested scenes from stock videos, images, and background music.

It has a simple and easy-to-use interface, as well as the ability to collaborate and share projects securely from the browser.

Meet

Translated subtitles can now be activated during video calls and a preferred language can be selected, making it easier to communicate with people worldwide.

Available in June, it will automatically detect and translate subtitles into a total of 69 supported languages.

AI Security

This add-on enables IT teams to automatically identify, classify, and protect sensitive files across the enterprise.

It uses privacy-preserving AI models that can be trained using data unique to each organization, enabling continuous assessment, classification, and protection of new and existing files in Drive.

New features in Sheets and Docs

A new feature has been introduced in Table Sheets that formats and organizes data in a sleek, updated layout. A template is selected, ranging from project management to event planning to inventory management, so you never have to create a spreadsheet from scratch again.
Also included is a new tabbed experience in Docs, which helps organize related information in a single document.

Gmail

New features have been introduced in Gmail that help you write messages through voice prompts. Gemini will also help transform notes into a more complete email draft with a single click.

And that’s it for the summary of the first day – we’ll be back tomorrow with more news!