Inspiration. Innovation. Education. The three words that underpinned Google Cloud Next London ‘23. Taking place across Wednesday 11th and Thursday 12th October at Tobacco Dock, London, this event brought together professionals to discuss challenges, solutions, ideas and game-changing solutions.
Google Next London covered the latest from across the Google ecosystem, echoing the 161 announcements made at San Francisco’s Google Cloud Next ‘23.
These announcments spanned across the ecosystem with updates from across data, modern infrastructure cloud and geo to name a few (check out our round-up of the geo announcements here). Here are some of the key highlights.
Unsurprisingly, the hot topic that is Generative AI was a huge focus of the event. With this focus came perhaps one of most noteworthy announcements – the general availability of Duet AI for Google Workspace. ICYMI, Duet AI is an AI-powered collaborator that aims to help users be more productive when using Google Cloud – all in real-time. Threaded throughout the Workspace suite (including Gmail, Docs and Sheets), Duet AI can do a lot of the heavy lifting with the right prompt. With just a few words, users can start creating content (for example, drafting emails or creating presentations) to help their workday go by more smoothly.
Also announced was the expansion of Duet AI in Google Cloud. Currently in preview, this side of Duet AI aims to make developers’ lives easier with features to support them across the entire software development lifecycle. Building on the capabilities that were unveiled at Google I/O in May (including code and chat assistance), Duet AI in Google Cloud now supports code refactoring for application modernisation and context-aware code generation amongst other new capabilities (more on that here). This is all set for general availability later this year so keep an eye out for this new and improved iteration.
Vertex AI is undergoing an expansion. New models have been added to Vertex AI Model Garden which include Llama 2 and Code Llama from Meta plus Falcon LLM from the Technology Innovation Institute. Anthropic’s Claude 2 was also pre-announced so that’s on the horizon. In terms of the existing line-up of models, PaLM 2 now supports 38 languages and 32-000 token context windows which will allow for long documents to be processed in prompts.
Also related to Vertex AI, Google has become the first cloud provider to provide digital watermarking functionality in its Imagen image generation model. Named SynthID, this functionality will allow a watermark to be added to images that have been created by generative AI. The watermark will not be visible to the human eye but it will be detectable for identification. Even if the image is modified (e.g. by adding a filter, changing a colour, etc.), the watermark will remain in place. As it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish photorealistic AI-generated content from genuine photos, this will empower users by letting them know which sort of content they are dealing with.
In addition to all of these, Google Cloud Next London '23 also saw the announcement of new and expanding customers and partners including BT Group, Gymshark, Formula E, and Unilever.
This is just a selection of the announcements so make sure you head to Google Cloud to check out the full list of announcements to find out what else is in store for the world of cloud.
If you would like to catch up on all things Google Cloud, please get in touch – we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us today.
Article updated on Friday 20th October 2023 to include a title change plus references to customer updates at Google Cloud Next London '23.