And adds rivals Claude 2, Falcon, Llama 2 to Vertex AI
Cloud Next Google is rolling out a bunch of generative AI models and tools across its Workspace apps and Cloud, including an expansion of the promised Duet AI, its personal virtual assistant.
The ad giant earlier this year teased it was adding ChatGPT-like Duet to its Workspace suite of cloud-based office applications – the collection formerly known as G Suite: we were told the chatty bot can be used to generate material for Google Slides, organize rows and columns in Sheets, and generate backgrounds in Meet, for instance.
Now it’s threatening to inject into other areas of Workspace Duet’s generative functionality – you ask it to do or make something, and it tries its best.
Google finds itself in the peculiar situation of having spent years and years researching, building, and deploying machine-learning systems – it basically developed transformers, the neural network architecture powering today’s boom in generative AI – but is perceived, at least, as having fallen behind Microsoft and OpenAI, which have been hyping up their AI products and billing themselves as pioneers.
Google has found out the hard way that no matter how much interesting stuff you come up with in a lab, for your own systems or for research, if you don’t openly and obnoxiously productize and market it early on, you’ll be seen as a chaser rather than a leader by pundits.
And so earlier this year, Google rushed to release its chatbot Bard amid fears Microsoft’s revamped generative-AI-based Bing web search might eat into its own search engine business.
