Google Cloud Expands Vertex AI Platform With New Models and Upgrades

Google Cloud has announced several updates and expansions to its Vertex AI platform, aimed at providing customers with a wide range of options for AI models.

The company has seen strong demand for Vertex AI, with customer accounts growing more than 15 times in the last quarter, Google Cloud said in a Tuesday (Aug. 29) blog post.

One of the key announcements is the addition of new models to Model Garden, Google Cloud’s curated collection of models, according to the post. These new models include Llama 2 and Code Llama from Meta, Falcon LLM from the Technology Innovation Institute, and the pre-announcement of Claude 2 from Anthropic. This range of models allows customers to choose the ones that best suit their needs, whether they are first-party, open source or third-party models.

“Model Garden’s variety lets enterprises match models to their needs, and when customers want full transparency into a model’s weights and artifacts, such as for compliance and auditing support purposes, open-source options such as Llama 2 and Falcon offer a great choice,” Google Cloud said in the post.

Google Cloud is also upgrading its first-party foundation models, according to the post. PaLM, a model for text and chat, now supports 38 languages and offers a 32,000-token context window for analyzing larger documents. Codey, a model for code generation and chat, has improved performance, and Imagen, a model for image generation, features enhanced image quality. Imagen also introduces a new digital watermarking functionality powered by Google DeepMind’s SynthID, enabling the creation of invisible and tamper-resistant watermarks in AI-generated images.

To help customers get more value out of the models, Google Cloud is introducing Vertex AI Extensions and Vertex AI data connectors, the post said. Vertex AI Extensions enable models to retrieve real-time data and take real-world actions, while Vertex AI data connectors offer data ingestion and read-only access across various sources.

Over 100 large models are available in Model Garden, per the post.

Google reported in July that its Cloud business revenue grew by 28% in the second quarter and that the evolving ecosystem of generative AI has supercharged its total addressable market (TAM).

“Google Cloud infrastructure is optimized for AI, and more than 70% of generative AI unicorns are Google Cloud customers,” Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at the time.