Google reveals what’s next for Cloud AI

Organizations can choose to run artificial intelligence (AI) workloads in any number of different locations on-premises or on different types of cloud infrastructure.

There is no shortage of cloud options when it comes to AI platforms, and it’s also clear that AI adoption overall is helping to drive cloud growth as well. At the Google Cloud Next 2022 event that got underway today, Google made it clear that it wants to be enterprises’ deployment target of choice for AI and machine learning (ML) workloads.

At the event, Google announced a series of services including its new Vertex AI Vision service, which is a computer-vision-as-a-service capability. Google also hopes to make it easier for enterprises to build specific types of applications that benefit from AI, which is where the new AI Agents service fits in. Rounding out Google’s AI announcements next is the OpenXLA Project, which is an open-source effort that aims to help bring together different machine learning frameworks.

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Google giving computer vision an ‘easy’ button 

Vertex AI was first launched by Google in May 2021 as a fully managed cloud AI service. Over the past year and a half Google has been incrementally expanding the service’s capabilities to help organizations with specific use cases.

Computer vision is among the most common types of AI use cases, providing image recognition capabilities that can be used for different applications. With its new Vertex AI Vision services, Google is providing its users with a managed service to help more easily build and deploy computer vision.

“This [Vertex AI Vision] is a fully managed service for computer vision applications that allows you to automatically analyze video streams and pictures and detect objects,” Gerrit Kazmaier, VP and GM of database, data analytics and Looker at Google said during a press briefing. “Basically giving all of our customers the ability to build advanced machine learning applications in a very streamlined way.”

The goal of making it easier for organizations to benefit from AI is also behind Google’s AI Agents initiatives. With AI Agents, Google is building out specific ‘agents’ which are purpose-built services for a specific function that are powered by Google AI technologies. At Google Cloud Next 2022, the company is announcing one such AI Agent with the new Translation Hub service. Kazmaier explained that the Translation Hub service will provide users with the ability to take documents and translate them into up to 135 different languages.

“Translation Hub basically builds on this idea of using AI and machine learning to make knowledge more accessible and widespread,” Kazmaier said. “Think about a company [and] the ability that you gain from this to understand and serve markets in different languages alive, so we are really excited about making translation more accessible to the world with the Translation Hub.”

Open-source machine learning moves forward with OpenXLA

Google is also using the Next 2022 event as a venue to highlight how it can also work with others in the AI and ML community.

“Google is collaborating with a number of open-source AI frameworks with industry experts, including AMD, Arm, Intel, Meta, Nvidia and others as part of our shared commitment to unite the AI ecosystem, helping customers avoid platform or model locking,” Sachin Gupta, VP and GM, of infrastructure at Google Cloud said during a press briefing.

The collaboration is occurring via the new OpenXLA project, which Gupta said has the goal of helping to reduce the cost and complexity of ML deployment. The way OpenXLA will help is by addressing the issue of fragmentation that is seen across ML infrastructure today. Gupta said that with an open community of contributors, OpenXLA is developing a modular compiler and infrastructure tools to help accelerate AI development. 

“Our long-term commitment to open ecosystems is grounded in the belief that no one company should own AI and ML innovation,” Gupta said.