Google Cloud Next: Google Taking 'Bold', 'Responsible' Approach with Generative AI
The shift to AI will be 'one of the most profound shifts we'll see in our lifetime.'
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Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said Google is working with a broad ecosystem of partners to make it easy for customers to adopt a cloud and generative AI platform.
“Our partner ecosystem has over 100,000 companies in Partner Advantage with new generative AI partners joining every single day,” he said. “These include foundation model builders, SaaS and application providers, infrastructure and platform partners, data providers, and SIs and consultancies, working with many SaaS companies to bring their AI technology to transform every business process in finance, human resources, marketing and sales, customer service, procurement, legal departments, manufacturing and supply chain.”
Google’s will power the next chapter of digital transformation with a “world-class” infrastructure and platform for building AI, Google’s always-on collaborator to help customers use AI in both Workspace and Google Cloud, and “our investment in your success across all industries and business functions together with our broad partner ecosystem,” Kurian said.
“Together, we’re building the new wave of cloud,” he said.
During Google Cloud Next, Kurian announcing an expanded partnership with Nvidia for integrating Serverless Spark with Nvidia Acceleration libraries and Nvidia GPUs for data science workloads with Google Dataproc.
“We are the only Serverless Spark offering that supports Nvidia GPUs and are seeing significant performance improvements,” he said. “You also heard our announcement of the general availability of our AI supercomputer based on Nvidia’s latest H100 accelerated GPUs.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said generative AI is “revolutionizing” every layer of the computing stack.
“And our two companies, with two of the most talented, deepest computer science and computing teams in the world, are joining forces to reinvent cloud infrastructure for generative AI,” he said. “This is a reengineering of the entire stack, from the processors to the systems, to the networks and all of the software, and all of this to accelerate GCP Vertex AI,l and to create software and infrastructure for the world’s AI researchers and developers. So that’s No. 1. No. 2, we’re going to put Nvidia DGX Cloud in GCP. This is where we do our research. This is where we optimize our incredible software stacks. And all of this work that we do will instantly benefit GCP and all the people that work on it. And the third thing is ultimately to accelerate Vertex AI and AI models, and AI software. The amount of work that we’re doing together in AI software is really incredible.”
Google completed its $5.4 billion acquisition of Mandiant last fall and merged it with Google Cloud.
“We promised when we acquired Mandiant that the future of cybersecurity requires combining the best threat intelligence to understand emerging threats, with the best data models to protect and respond,” Kurian said. “Today, you saw us fulfilling that promise to keep each of you safe.”
During Google Cloud Next, Google announced Duet Al in Mandiant Threat Intelligence. Generative Al features expedite threat assessment and operationalize threat intelligence across an organization. In addition, with Mandiant Hunt for Chronicle, Mandiant experts perform threat hunting on Chronicle data using Google intelligence to search for undetected attacks. Both are available now in preview and should be generally available this year.
Google is combining the most relevant threat intelligence and knowledge of bad actors with the “best tools for your security operations,” Kurian said.
Kevin Mandia, CEO of Mandiant, said cybersecurity is top of mind for every single organization.
“All you have to do is read the news and you can see where a recent attack occurred,” he said. “At Google and Mandiant, we are on the front lines of responding to these attacks and getting a frontline view of it. Last year, Mandiant performed over 1,800 engagements to help organizations prepare for, respond to and recover from security incidents. We are learning firsthand the new and novel ways that cyber attackers are invading the common popular safeguards, and our knowledge of new and novel attacks continues to grow. This year, our investigations are up more than 35% over last year, and security is a critical component of any digital transformation.”
Google Cloud delivers a combination of three must-have capabilities in cybersecurity, Mandia said.
“First, we have frontline intelligence and expertise,” he said. “Second, we have a modern security operations lab. And third, we have an underlying foundation of a secure cloud platform.”
When it comes to cybersecurity, frontline intelligence “makes you situationally aware so you can operate in the current threat environment with confidence,” Mandia said
“You have to know what you’re up against to defend from it,” he said. “We take insight from incident response work that Mandiant is doing, plus Google’s visibility from running 1 billion user internet services, plus open-sourced and crowdsourced intelligence. We fuse it together. We make it actionable at scale across our products. We take this knowledge and we work tirelessly to defend you and close the window of effectiveness of attacks. And we believe Google Cloud has the best innovation group in the industry.”
Google recently launched its Chronicle CyberShield, which allows governments to apply Google and Mandiant‘s security operations capabilities across their environments, Mandia said.
“CyberShield breaks down those information silos of different government agencies … and it centralizes security data so you can get national situational awareness in your cyber domain,” he said. “Beyond technology, CyberShield provides training and upskilling of cyber talent to help nations defend their cyber domain. The Israeli National Cyber Directorate and Google are working closely together to raise their national defense. We’re already seeing interest around the world from other organizations and governments. And we have a unique partnership model that blends technology, methodology and, most important to security, trust. And while a modern platform is critically important, ultimately we want to help you achieve the security outcomes that your organization is aiming for.”
Security operations teams can now get threat hunting on their Chronicle data by Mandiant experts, Mandia said.
“They can use our latest frontline intelligence to expose attacker activity before it negatively impacts your organizations,” he said. “In short, having Mendiant Hunt for Chronicle is like adding thousands of security experts to your team overnight. And finally, we provide a secure by design, secure by default cloud platform to run your business on. The importance of this strong foundation cannot be overlooked.”
According to cloudvulndb.org, a community-based website tracking cloud vulnerabilities and security issues, Google Cloud has had 75% fewer critical and high-severity vulnerabilities since 2020 than “one of the major cloud providers” and 60% fewer vulnerabilities than the “other major cloud provider,” Mandia said.
“We’re not built on a lazy foundation, nor are we legacy first in terms of our core services,” he said. “And the consequence of a legacy-first innovation approach is clear when you see how often other infrastructures are being exploited. But even armed with the right intelligence, products and infrastructure, security is still too challenging for the majority of organizations. And this is where AI is going to change the game for all of us. Currently, security analysts are overwhelmed with the security events that they see every day. Duet AI reduces analyst time spent writing, running and refining searches, and triaging complex cases by seven times.”
According to cloudvulndb.org, a community-based website tracking cloud vulnerabilities and security issues, Google Cloud has had 75% fewer critical and high-severity vulnerabilities since 2020 than “one of the major cloud providers” and 60% fewer vulnerabilities than the “other major cloud provider,” Mandia said.
“We’re not built on a lazy foundation, nor are we legacy first in terms of our core services,” he said. “And the consequence of a legacy-first innovation approach is clear when you see how often other infrastructures are being exploited. But even armed with the right intelligence, products and infrastructure, security is still too challenging for the majority of organizations. And this is where AI is going to change the game for all of us. Currently, security analysts are overwhelmed with the security events that they see every day. Duet AI reduces analyst time spent writing, running and refining searches, and triaging complex cases by seven times.”
Generative AI took center stage on Day 1 of this week’s massive Google Cloud Next in San Francisco.
Google Cloud announced numerous updates and new capabilities, many powered by generative AI advancements. Google CEO Sundar Pichai (shown above, delivering his remarks) told attendees Google will continue to be “bold and responsible” in its approach to generative AI and “make these powerful tools accessible so everyone can benefit.”
The shift to AI will be “one of the most profound shifts we’ll see in our lifetime, he said.
“It will touch every sector, every industry, every business function, and significantly change the way we live and work,” Pichai said. “This isn’t just the future. We are already starting to experience the benefits right now. As a company, we’ve been preparing for this moment for some time, and for the last seven years we have taken an AI-first approach, applying AI to make our products radically more helpful. We believe that making AI helpful for everyone is the most important way we’ll deliver on our mission in the next decade. That’s why we have invested in the very best tooling, foundation models and infrastructure across both CPUs and GPUs. These underlying technologies are helping us transform our products and businesses, and they’ll help you transform yours.”
Perfecting Google Search
Google Cloud has spent the past 25 years trying to perfect Google Search, and “we are still not done yet,” Pichai said.
“Today we are using generative AI to reimagine the experience and take more of the work out of searching,” he said. “We call this the search generative experience or SG for short. SG uses advanced AI to help you get the gist of a topic quickly with an overview, easily follow up on questions in a conversational way, or even make coding tasks easier. We’ve had really great feedback so far helping us learn and improve fast. As we build generative AI into search, we are drawing on years of insights and technology development to harness and deploy AI at scale. Google Cloud is how we provide the same insights, tools and platforms to help you all innovate to sharing the best of our AI directly. And it’s been really exciting to see how customers have started using generative AI in just a short time.”
For example, GM is using Google Cloud’s conversational AI in its OnStar connected vehicles, and it will continue to explore other ways to apply chat and document analysis to give drivers information when they need it, Pichai said. In addition, HCA Health Care is collaborating with Google Cloud to bring Medcom, Google’s large model for health care, to help doctors provide better patient care.
Just Scratching the Surface
“This is only scratching the surface of what we have seen since making our foundation models available through our cloud AI platform called Vertex AI,” Pichai said. “Since March, tens of thousands of developers are now using over 100 AI models on Vertex, building generative AI applications. We are working with partners across our open ecosystem to expand a variety of models customers can choose so they have the right model for whatever they want to create. We truly believe we are embarking on a golden age of innovation and we are excited for what we will build together with all of you,” he said.
Scroll through our slideshow above for more from Google Cloud Next.
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