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Google Gemini: Everything you need to know about the new generative AI platform | TechCrunch

April 30, 2024 5:10 AM0


Google’s trying to make waves with Gemini, its flagship suite of generative AI models, apps and services.

So what is Gemini? How can you use it? And how does it stack up to the competition?

To make it easier to keep up with the latest Gemini developments, we’ve put together this handy guide, which we’ll keep updated as new Gemini models, features and news about Google’s plans for Gemini are released.

What is Gemini?

Gemini is Google’s long-promised, next-gen GenAI model family, developed by Google’s AI research labs DeepMind and Google Research. It comes in three flavors:

  • Gemini Ultra, the most performant Gemini model.
  • Gemini Pro, a “lite” Gemini model.
  • Gemini Nano, a smaller “distilled” model that runs on mobile devices like the Pixel 8 Pro.

All Gemini models were trained to be “natively multimodal” — in other words, able to work with and use more than just words. They were pretrained and fine-tuned on a variety of audio, images and videos, a large set of codebases and text in different languages.

This sets Gemini apart from models such as Google’s own LaMDA, which was trained exclusively on text data. LaMDA can’t understand or generate anything other than text (e.g., essays, email drafts), but that isn’t the case with Gemini models.

What’s the difference between the Gemini apps and Gemini models?

Image Credits: Google

Google, proving once again that it lacks a knack for branding, didn’t make it clear from the outset that Gemini is separate and distinct from the Gemini apps on the web and mobile (formerly Bard). The Gemini apps are simply an interface through which certain Gemini models can be accessed — think of it as a client for Google’s GenAI.

Incidentally, the Gemini apps and models are also totally independent from Imagen 2, Google’s text-to-image model that’s available in some of the company’s dev tools and environments.

What can Gemini do?

Because the Gemini models are multimodal, they can in theory perform a range of multimodal tasks, from transcribing speech to captioning images and videos to generating artwork. Some of these capabilities have reached the product stage yet (more on that later), and Google’s promising all of them — and more — at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Of course, it’s a bit hard to take the company at its word.

Google seriously underdelivered with the original Bard launch. And more recently it ruffled feathers with a video purporting to show Gemini’s capabilities that turned out to have been heavily doctored and was more or less aspirational.

Google’s best Gemini demo was faked

Still, assuming Google is being more or less truthful with its claims, here’s what the different tiers of Gemini will be able to do once they reach their full potential:

Gemini Ultra

Google says that Gemini Ultra — thanks to its multimodality — can be used to help with things like physics homework, solving problems step-by-step on a worksheet and pointing out possible mistakes in already filled-in answers.

Gemini Ultra can also be applied to tasks such as identifying scientific papers relevant to a particular problem, Google says — extracting information from those papers and “updating” a chart from one by generating the formulas necessary to re-create the chart with more recent data.

Gemini Ultra technically supports image generation, as alluded to earlier. But that capability hasn’t made its way into the productized version of the model yet — perhaps because the mechanism is more complex than how apps such as ChatGPT generate images. Rather than feed prompts to an image generator (like DALL-E 3, in ChatGPT’s case), Gemini outputs images “natively,” without an intermediary step.

Gemini Ultra is available as an API through Vertex AI, Google’s fully managed AI developer platform, and AI Studio, Google’s web-based tool for app and platform developers. It also powers the Gemini apps — but not for free. Access to Gemini Ultra through what Google calls Gemini Advanced requires subscribing to the Google One AI Premium Plan, priced at $20 per month.

The AI Premium Plan also connects Gemini to your wider Google Workspace account — think emails in Gmail, documents in Docs, presentations in Sheets and Google Meet recordings. That’s useful for, say, summarizing emails or having Gemini capture notes during a video call.

Gemini Pro

Google says that Gemini Pro is an improvement over LaMDA in its reasoning, planning and understanding capabilities.

An independent study by Carnegie Mellon and BerriAI researchers found that the initial version of Gemini Pro was indeed better than OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 at handling longer and more complex reasoning chains. But the study also found that, like all large language models, this version of Gemini Pro particularly struggled with mathematics problems involving several digits, and users found examples of bad reasoning and obvious mistakes.

Early impressions of Google’s Gemini aren’t great

Google promised remedies, though — and the first arrived in the form of Gemini 1.5 Pro.

Designed to be a drop-in replacement, Gemini 1.5 Pro is improved in a number of areas compared with its predecessor, perhaps most significantly in the amount of data that it can process. Gemini 1.5 Pro can take in ~700,000 words, or ~30,000 lines of code — 35x the amount Gemini 1.0 Pro can handle. And — the model being multimodal — it’s not limited to text. Gemini 1.5 Pro can analyze up to 11 hours of audio or an hour of video in a variety of different languages, albeit slowly (e.g., searching for a scene in a one-hour video takes 30 seconds to a minute of processing).

Gemini 1.5 Pro entered public preview on Vertex AI in April.

An additional endpoint, Gemini Pro Vision, can process text and imagery — including photos and video — and output text along the lines of OpenAI’s GPT-4 with Vision model.

Using Gemini Pro in Vertex AI. Image Credits: Gemini

Within Vertex AI, developers can customize Gemini Pro to specific contexts and use cases using a fine-tuning or “grounding” process. Gemini Pro can also be connected to external, third-party APIs to perform particular actions.

Google brings Gemini Pro to Vertex AI

In AI Studio, there’s workflows for creating structured chat prompts using Gemini Pro. Developers have access to both Gemini Pro and the Gemini Pro Vision endpoints, and they can adjust the model temperature to control the output’s creative range and provide examples to give tone and style instructions — and also tune the safety settings.

Gemini Nano

Gemini Nano is a much smaller version of the Gemini Pro and Ultra models, and it’s efficient enough to run directly on (some) phones instead of sending the task to a server somewhere. So far, it powers a couple of features on the Pixel 8 Pro, Pixel 8 and Samsung Galaxy S24, including Summarize in Recorder and Smart Reply in Gboard.

The Recorder app, which lets users push a button to record and transcribe audio, includes a Gemini-powered summary of your recorded conversations, interviews, presentations and other snippets. Users get these summaries even if they don’t have a signal or Wi-Fi connection available — and in a nod to privacy, no data leaves their phone in the process.

Gemini Nano is also in Gboard, Google’s keyboard app. There, it powers a feature called Smart Reply, which helps to suggest the next thing you’ll want to say when having a conversation in a messaging app. The feature initially only works with WhatsApp but will come to more apps over time, Google says.

And in the Google Messages app on supported devices, Nano enables Magic Compose, which can craft messages in styles like “excited,” “formal” and “lyrical.”

Is Gemini better than OpenAI’s GPT-4?

Google has several times touted Gemini’s superiority on benchmarks, claiming that Gemini Ultra exceeds current state-of-the-art results on “30 of the 32 widely used academic benchmarks used in large language model research and development.” The company says that Gemini 1.5 Pro, meanwhile, is more capable at tasks like summarizing content, brainstorming and writing than Gemini Ultra in some scenarios; presumably this will change with the release of the next Ultra model.

But leaving aside the question of whether benchmarks really indicate a better model, the scores Google points to appear to be only marginally better than OpenAI’s corresponding models. And — as mentioned earlier — some early impressions haven’t been great, with users and academics pointing out that the older version of Gemini Pro tends to get basic facts wrong, struggles with translations and gives poor coding suggestions.

How much does Gemini cost?

Gemini 1.5 Pro is free to use in the Gemini apps and, for now, AI Studio and Vertex AI.

Once Gemini 1.5 Pro exits preview in Vertex, however, the model will cost $0.0025 per character while output will cost $0.00005 per character. Vertex customers pay per 1,000 characters (about 140 to 250 words) and, in the case of models like Gemini Pro Vision, per image ($0.0025).

Let’s assume a 500-word article contains 2,000 characters. Summarizing that article with Gemini 1.5 Pro would cost $5. Meanwhile, generating an article of a similar length would cost $0.1.

Ultra pricing has yet to be announced.

Where can you try Gemini?

Gemini Pro

The easiest place to experience Gemini Pro is in the Gemini apps. Pro and Ultra are answering queries in a range of languages.

Gemini Pro and Ultra are also accessible in preview in Vertex AI via an API. The API is free to use “within limits” for the time being and supports certain regions, including Europe, as well as features like chat functionality and filtering.

Elsewhere, Gemini Pro and Ultra can be found in AI Studio. Using the service, developers can iterate prompts and Gemini-based chatbots and then get API keys to use them in their apps — or export the code to a more fully featured IDE.

Code Assist (formerly Duet AI for Developers), Google’s suite of AI-powered assistance tools for code completion and generation, is using Gemini models. Developers can perform “large-scale” changes across codebases, for example updating cross-file dependencies and reviewing large chunks of code.

Google’s brought Gemini models to its dev tools for Chrome and Firebase mobile dev platform, and its database creation and management tools. And it’s launched new security products underpinned by Gemini, like Gemini in Threat Intelligence, a component of Google’s Mandiant cybersecurity platform that can analyze large portions of potentially malicious code and let users perform natural language searches for ongoing threats or indicators of compromise.

Gemini Nano

Gemini Nano is on the Pixel 8 Pro, Pixel 8 and Samsung Galaxy S24 — and will come to other devices in the future. Developers interested in incorporating the model into their Android apps can sign up for a sneak peek.

Is Gemini coming to the iPhone?

It might! Apple and Google are reportedly in talks to put Gemini to use for a number of features to be included in an upcoming iOS update later this year. Nothing’s definitive, as Apple is also reportedly in talks with OpenAI, and has been working on developing its own GenAI capabilities.

This post was originally published Feb. 16, 2024 and has since been updated to include new information about Gemini and Google’s plans for it.


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Google lays off staff from Flutter, Dart and Python weeks before its developer conference | TechCrunch

April 30, 2024 12:17 AM0


Ahead of Google’s annual I/O developer conference in May, the tech giant has laid off staff across key teams like Flutter, Dart, Python and others, according to reports from affected employees shared on social media. Google confirmed the layoffs to TechCrunch, but not the specific teams, roles or how many people were let go.

“As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” a Google spokesperson said. “To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023 and into 2024, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers, and align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Through this, we’re simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers.”

The company clarified that the layoffs were not company-wide but were reorgs that are a part of the normal course of business. Affected employees will be able to apply for other open roles at Google, we’re told.

In one X post, a PM from Flutter and Dart said the layoffs had affected “a LOT of teams,” and that “lots of great projects lost people.”

“We’re sad, but still cranking hard on I/O and beyond,” wrote Google PM Kevin Moore in the Flutter development community on Reddit, where he added that Flutter and Dart weren’t affected any more or less than other teams. “We know ya’ll care SO MUCH about the project and the team and the awesome ecosystem we’ve built together. You’re nervous. I get it. We get it. You’re betting on Flutter and Dart. So am I. So is Google,” he said.

Google also told TechCrunch that Flutter will have new updates to share at I/O this year.

In a separate post on Reddit, another commenter noted the Python team affected by the layoffs were those who managed the internal Python runtimes and toolchains and worked with OSS Python. Included in this group were “multiple current and former core devs and steering council members,” they said.

Meanwhile, others shared on Y Combinator’s Hacker News, where a Python team member detailed their specific duties on the technical front and noted that, for years, much of the work was done with fewer than 10 people. Another Hacker News commenter said their early years on the Python team were spent paying down internal technical debt accumulated from not having a strong Python strategy.

“…despite the understaffing, we had managers who were extremely good about maintaining work/life balance and the ‘marathon, not sprint’ approach to work. As I said in another comment, it’s the best job I’ve ever had, and I’ll miss it deeply,” they wrote.

“Python was one of the very first languages used widely at Google. It was the last major backend language to get a language team,” the user, gpshead, also said.

Though Google didn’t detail headcount, some of the layoffs at Google may have been confirmed in a WARN notice filed on April 24. WARN, or the California Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, requires employers with more than 100 employees to provide 60-day notice in advance of layoffs. In the filing, Google said it was laying off a total of 50 employees across three locations in Sunnyvale.

On social media, commenters raised concerns with the Python layoffs in particular, given the role that Python tooling plays in AI. But others pointed out that Google didn’t eliminate its Python team, it replaced that team with another group based in Munich — at least according to Python Steering Council member Thomas Wouters, in a post on Mastodon.

“It’s a tough day when everyone you work with directly, including your manager, is laid off — excuse me, ‘had their roles reduced,’ and you’re asked to onboard their replacements, people told to take those very same roles just in a different country who are not any happier about it,” he said in a Mastodon post last Thursday.

Google said it would support all affected employees, in line with local requirements, by providing them with time to search for different roles at Google or elsewhere, access to outplacement services and severance.




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Google's new 'Speaking practice' feature uses AI to help users improve their English skills | TechCrunch

April 26, 2024 8:25 PM0


Google is testing a new “Speaking practice” feature in Search that helps users improve their conversational English skills. The company told TechCrunch that the feature is available to English learners in Argentina, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and Venezuela who have joined Search Labs, its program for users to experiment with early-stage Google Search experiences.

The company says the goal of the experiment is to help improve a user’s English skills by getting them to take part in interactive language learning exercises powered by AI to help them use new words in everyday scenarios.

Speaking practice builds on a feature that Google launched last October that is designed to help English learners improve their skills. While the feature launched last year allows English learners to practice speaking sentences in context and receive feedback on grammar and clarity, Speaking practice adds in the dimension of back and forth conversational practice.

The feature was first spotted by an X user, who shared screenshots of the functionality in action.

Speaking practice works by asking the user a conversational question that they need to respond to using specific words. According to the screenshots, one possible scenario could include the AI telling the user that they want to get into shape and then ask: “What should I do?” The user would then need to say a response that includes the words “exercise,” “heart,” and “tired.”

The idea behind the feature is to help English language learners hold a conversation in English, while also understanding how to properly use different words.

The launch of the new feature indicates that Google might be laying the groundwork for a true competitor to language learning apps like Duolingo and Babbel. This isn’t the first time that Google has dabbled in language learning and education tools. Back in 2019, Google launched a feature that allowed Search users to practice how to pronounce words properly.




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It's a sunny day for Google Cloud | TechCrunch

April 26, 2024 3:25 AM0


Google Cloud, Google’s cloud computing division, had a blockbuster fiscal quarter, blowing past analysts’ expectations and sending Google parent company Alphabet’s stock soaring 13%+ in after-hours trading.

Google Cloud revenue jumped 28% to $9.57 billion in Q1 2024, bolstered by the demand for generative AI tools that rely on cloud infrastructure, services and apps. That continues a positive trend for the division, which in the previous quarter (Q4 2023) notched year-on-year growth of 25.66%.

Google Cloud’s operating income grew nearly 5x to $900 billion, up from $191 million. No doubt investors were pleased about this tidbit, along with Alphabet’s first-ever dividend (of 20 cents per share) and a $70 billion share repurchase program.

Elsewhere across Alphabet, Google Search and other revenue climbed 14.4% to $46.15 billion in the first fiscal quarter. YouTube revenue was up 20% year-over-year to $8.09 billion (a slight dip from Q4 2023 revenue of $9.2 billion), and Google’s overall advertising business gained 13% year-on-year to reach $61.6 billion.

Alphabet’s Other Bets category, which includes the company’s self-driving vehicle subsidiary Waymo, was the notable loser. Revenue grew 72% to $495 million in Q1, but Other Bets lost $1.02 billion — about the same as it lost in Q4 2023. (Other Bets typically isn’t profitable.)

Alphabet’s whole-org revenue stands at $80.5 billion, an increase of 15% year-over-year, with net income coming in at $23.7 billion (up 57%). Beyond Google Cloud’s performance, a reduced headcount might’ve contributed to the winning quarter; Alphabet reported a 5% drop in workforce to 180,895 employees.

On a call with investors, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said that YouTube’s and Google’s cloud businesses are projected to reach a combined annual run rate of over $100 billion by the end of 2024. Last year, the divisions’ combined revenue was $64.59 billion, with Google Cloud raking in $33.08 billion and YouTube generating $31.51 billion.

“Taking a step back, it took Google more than 15 years to reach $100 billion in annual revenue,” Pichai said. “In just the last six years, we’ve gone from $100 billion to more than $300 billion in annual revenue. … This shows our track record of investing in and building successful new growing businesses.”


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Security bugs in popular phone-tracking app iSharing exposed users' precise locations | TechCrunch

April 25, 2024 4:27 AM0


Last week when a security researcher said he could easily obtain the precise location from any one of the millions of users of a widely used phone-tracking app, we had to see it for ourselves.

Eric Daigle, a computer science and economics student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, found the vulnerabilities in the tracking app iSharing as part of an investigation into the security of location-tracking apps. iSharing is one of the more popular location-tracking apps, claiming more than 35 million users to date.

Daigle said the bugs allowed anyone using the app to access anyone else’s coordinates, even if the user wasn’t actively sharing their location data with anybody else. The bugs also exposed the user’s name, profile photo and the email address and phone number used to log in to the app.

The bugs meant that iSharing’s servers were not properly checking that app users were only allowed to access their location data or someone else’s location data shared with them.

Location-tracking apps — including stealthy “stalkerware” apps — have a history of security mishaps that risk leaking or exposing users’ precise location.

In this case, it took Daigle only a few seconds to locate this reporter down to a few feet. Using an Android phone with the iSharing app installed and a new user account, we asked the researcher if he could pull our precise location using the bugs.

“770 Broadway in Manhattan?” Daigle responded, along with the precise coordinates of TechCrunch’s office in New York from where the phone was pinging out its location.

The security researcher pulled our precise location data from iSharing’s servers, even though the app was not sharing our location with anybody else. Image Credits: TechCrunch (screenshot)

Daigle shared details of the vulnerability with iSharing some two weeks earlier but had not heard anything back. That’s when Daigle asked TechCrunch for help in contacting the app makers. iSharing fixed the bugs soon after or during the weekend of April 20-21.

“We are grateful to the researcher for discovering this issue so we could get ahead of it,” iSharing co-founder Yongjae Chuh told TechCrunch in an email. “Our team is currently planning on working with security professionals to add any necessary security measures to make sure every user’s data is protected.”

iSharing blamed the vulnerability on a feature it calls groups, which allows users to share their location with other users. Chuh told TechCrunch that the company’s logs showed there was no evidence that the bugs were found prior to Daigle’s discovery. Chuh conceded that there “may have been oversight on our end,” because its servers were failing to check if users were allowed to join a group of other users.

TechCrunch held the publication of this story until Daigle confirmed the fix.

“Finding the initial flaw in total was probably an hour or so from opening the app, figuring out the form of the requests, and seeing that creating a group on another user and joining it worked,” Daigle told TechCrunch.

From there, he spent a few more hours building a proof-of-concept script to demonstrate the security bug.

Daigle, who described the vulnerabilities in more detail on his blog, said he plans to continue research in the stalkerware and location-tracking area.

Read more on TechCrunch:

To contact this reporter, get in touch on Signal and WhatsApp at +1 646-755-8849, or by email. You can also send files and documents via SecureDrop.


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Google-backed Glance pilots Android lockscreen platform in US | TechCrunch

April 24, 2024 9:06 AM0


Glance, which operates a lockscreen platform targetting Android smartphones, is setting its sights on the U.S. market. The Indian startup recently commenced a pilot program in partnership with Motorola and Verizon in the U.S., with plans for a full launch in the country later this year, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The Bengaluru-headquartered startup, backed by investors including Google and Jio Platforms, has already made significant inroads in India, Southeast Asia, and Japan, where it expanded last year. Glance’s technology delivers a customized feed of news, local events, sports updates, media content as well as interactive games directly to users’ lockscreens without requiring them to install additional apps.

Android smartphone manufacturers have faced increasing pressure to boost revenue in recent years amid fierce competition and slim profit margins on hardware. Initially, many of these companies sought out new revenue streams to supplement their core business. However, as Glance’s lockscreen platform gained traction, coupled with its privacy stance, a growing number of smartphone makers have acknowledged its potential as a powerful tool for differentiation, industry executives say.

Glance doesn’t collect personal data of users, instead relying on usage pattern to inform its recommendation engine. It’s also working with Qualcomm to build a unique AI-powered lockscreen experience, according to one source. That partnership, if it materializes, will also allow Glance to significantly reduce the data it consumes for its personalized feed and also move much of the processing to on-device.

In the U.S., Glance doesn’t plan to display ads on the lockscreen, according to one of the sources. Glance ships pre-installed on the device, but can be easily removed.

Lockscreen and other non-app screens are becoming crucial real-estates for smartphone vendors and brands. “‘Surfaces’ exist even today, driven by 3 types of players — OEM-driven, OS-driven, and surface-first innovation driven,” BCG wrote in a recent industry report. “Players like Glance are the most interesting of the lot w.r.t. innovation in AI deployed, to serve relevant content for a user every single time.”

Glance’s lockscreen platform today reaches more than 450 million smartphones and is active on about 300 million of them, according to a person familiar with the matter.

In the U.S., the eponymous startup plans to tie-up with more telecom operators as well as brands including CNN and the NBA, sources said, requesting anonymity as the details are private. The recently launched Moto G Power smartphone in the U.S. shipped with Glance’s platform. A Glance spokesperson declined to comment.

Glance has been eyeing to launch in the U.S. for at least two years, TechCrunch earlier reported. It’s not clear why it didn’t launch in the U.S. sooner.

The Indian startup’s lockscreen technology has already proven successful in driving user engagement and app installations for brand partners. A nine-week partnership with Indian streaming service JioCinema last year resulted in 9 million incremental app installs from over 100 million unique impressions, BCG wrote. The campaign also targeted dormant users, leading to a 12.5% increase in app opens and converting the install base into daily active users, the report added.


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Google Cloud Next 2024: Everything announced so far | TechCrunch

April 19, 2024 5:45 PM0


Google’s Cloud Next 2024 event takes place in Las Vegas through Thursday, and that means lots of new cloud-focused news on everything from Gemini, Google’s AI-powered chatbot, to AI to devops and security. Last year’s event was the first in-person Cloud Next since 2019, and Google took to the stage to show off its ongoing dedication to AI with its Duet AI for Gmail and many other debuts, including expansion of generative AI to its security product line and other enterprise-focused updates and debuts.

Don’t have time to watch the full archive of Google’s keynote event? That’s OK; we’ve summed up the most important parts of the event below, with additional details from the TechCrunch team on the ground at the event. And Tuesday’s updates weren’t the only things Google made available to non-attendees — Wednesday’s developer-focused stream started at 10:30 a.m. PT.

Google Vids

Leveraging AI to help customers develop creative content is something Big Tech is looking for, and Tuesday, Google introduced its version. Google Vids, a new AI-fueled video creation tool, is the latest feature added to the Google Workspace.

Here’s how it works: Google claims users can make videos alongside other Workspace tools like Docs and Sheets. The editing, writing and production is all there. You also can collaborate with colleagues in real time within Google Vids. Read more

Gemini Code Assist

After reading about Google’s new Gemini Code Assist, an enterprise-focused AI code completion and assistance tool, you may be asking yourself if that sounds familiar. And you would be correct. TechCrunch Senior Editor Frederic Lardinois writes that “Google previously offered a similar service under the now-defunct Duet AI branding.” Then Gemini came along. Code Assist is a direct competitor to GitHub’s Copilot Enterprise. Here’s why

And to put Gemini Code Assist into context, Alex Wilhelm breaks down its competition with Copilot, and its potential risks and benefits to developers, in the latest TechCrunch Minute episode.

Google Workspace

Image Credits: Google

Among the new features are voice prompts to kick off the AI-based “Help me write” feature in Gmail while on the go. Another one for Gmail includes a way to instantly turn rough email drafts into a more polished email. Over on Sheets, you can send out a customizable alert when a certain field changes. Meanwhile, a new set of templates make starting a new spreadsheet easier. For the Doc lovers, there is support for tabs now. This is good because, according to the company, you can “organize information in a single document instead of linking to multiple documents or searching through Drive.” Of course, subscribers get the goodies first. Read more

Google also seems to have plans to monetize two of its new AI features for the Google Workspace productivity suite. This will look like $10/month/user add-on packages. One will be for the new AI meetings and messaging add-on that takes notes for you, provides meeting summaries and translates content into 69 languages. The other is for the introduced AI security package, which helps admins keep Google Workspace content more secure. Read more

Imagen 2

In February, Google announced an image generator built into Gemini, Google’s AI-powered chatbot. The company pulled it shortly after it was found to be randomly injecting gender and racial diversity into prompts about people. This resulted in some offensive inaccuracies. While we waited for an eventual re-release, Google came out with the enhanced image-generating tool, Imagen 2. This is inside its Vertex AI developer platform and has more of a focus on enterprise. Imagen 2 is now generally available and comes with some fun new capabilities, including inpainting and outpainting. There’s also what Google’s calling “text-to-live images” where you can now create short, four-second videos from text prompts, along the lines of AI-powered clip generation tools like Runway, Pika and Irreverent Labs. Read more

Vertex AI Agent Builder

We can all use a little bit of help, right? Meet Google’s Vertex AI Agent Builder, a new tool to help companies build AI agents.

“Vertex AI Agent Builder allows people to very easily and quickly build conversational agents,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said. “You can build and deploy production-ready, generative AI-powered conversational agents and instruct and guide them the same way that you do humans to improve the quality and correctness of answers from models.”

To do this, the company uses a process called “grounding,” where the answers are tied to something considered to be a reliable source. In this case, it’s relying on Google Search (which in reality could or could not be accurate). Read more

Gemini comes to databases

Google calls Gemini in Databases a collection of features that “simplify all aspects of the database journey.” In less jargony language, it’s a bundle of AI-powered, developer-focused tools for Google Cloud customers who are creating, monitoring and migrating app databases. Read more

Google renews its focus on data sovereignty

Image Credits: MirageC / Getty Images

Google has offered cloud sovereignties before, but now it is focused more on partnerships rather than building them out on their own. Read more

Security tools get some AI love

Image Credits: Getty Images

Google jumps on board the productizing generative AI-powered security tool train with a number of new products and features aimed at large companies. Those include Threat Intelligence, which can analyze large portions of potentially malicious code. It also lets users perform natural language searches for ongoing threats or indicators of compromise. Another is Chronicle, Google’s cybersecurity telemetry offering for cloud customers to assist with cybersecurity investigations. The third is the enterprise cybersecurity and risk management suite Security Command Center. Read more

Nvidia’s Blackwell platform

One of the anticipated announcements is Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell platform coming to Google Cloud in early 2025. Yes, that seems so far away. However, here is what to look forward to: support for the high-performance Nvidia HGX B200 for AI and HPC workloads and GB200 NBL72 for large language model (LLM) training. Oh, and we can reveal that the GB200 servers will be liquid-cooled. Read more

Chrome Enterprise Premium

Meanwhile, Google is expanding its Chrome Enterprise product suite with the launch of Chrome Enterprise Premium. What’s new here is that it mainly pertains mostly to security capabilities of the existing service, based on the insight that browsers are now the endpoints where most of the high-value work inside a company is done. Read more

Gemini 1.5 Pro

Image Credits: Google

Everyone can use a “half” every now and again, and Google obliges with Gemini 1.5 Pro. This, Kyle Wiggers writes, is “Google’s most capable generative AI model,” and is now available in public preview on Vertex AI, Google’s enterprise-focused AI development platform. Here’s what you get for that half: The amount of context that it can process, which is from 128,000 tokens up to 1 million tokens, where “tokens” refers to subdivided bits of raw data (like the syllables “fan,” “tas” and “tic” in the word “fantastic”). Read more

Open source tools

Image Credits: Getty Images

At Google Cloud Next 2024, the company debuted a number of open source tools primarily aimed at supporting generative AI projects and infrastructure. One is Max Diffusion, which is a collection of reference implementations of various diffusion models that run on XLA, or Accelerated Linear Algebra, devices. Then there is JetStream, a new engine to run generative AI models. The third is MaxTest, a collection of text-generating AI models targeting TPUs and Nvidia GPUs in the cloud. Read more

Axion

Image Credits: Google

We don’t know a lot about this one, however, here is what we do know: Google Cloud joins AWS and Azure in announcing its first custom-built Arm processor, dubbed Axion. Frederic Lardinois writes that “based on Arm’s Neoverse 2 designs, Google says its Axion instances offer 30% better performance than other Arm-based instances from competitors like AWS and Microsoft and up to 50% better performance and 60% better energy efficiency than comparable X86-based instances.” Read more

The entire Google Cloud Next keynote

If all of that isn’t enough of an AI and cloud update deluge, you can watch the entire event keynote via the embed below.

Google Cloud Next’s developer keynote

On Wednesday, Google held a separate keynote for developers. They offered a deeper dive into the ins and outs of a number of tools outlined during the Tuesday keynote, including Gemini Cloud Assist, using AI for product recommendations and chat agents, ending with a showcase from Hugging Face. You can check out the full keynote below.


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Google brings AI-powered editing tools, like Magic Editor, to all Google Photos users for free | TechCrunch

April 19, 2024 5:41 AM0


Google Photos is getting an AI upgrade. On Wednesday, the tech giant announced that a handful of enhanced editing features previously limited to Pixel devices and paid subscribers — including its AI-powered Magic Editor — will now make their way to all Google Photos users for free. This expansion also includes Google’s Magic Eraser, which removes unwanted items from photos; Photo Unblur, which uses machine learning to sharpen blurry photos; Portrait Light, which lets you change the light source on photos after the fact, and others.

The editing tools have historically been a selling point for Google’s high-end devices, the Pixel phones, as well as a draw for Google’s cloud storage subscription product, Google One. But with the growing number of AI-powered editing tools flooding the market, Google has decided to make its set of AI photo editing features available to more people for free.

Image Credits: Google

There are some caveats to this expansion, however.

For starters, the tools will only start rolling out on May 15 and it will take weeks for them to make it to all Google Photos users.

In addition, there are some hardware device requirements to be able to use them. On ChromeOS, for instance, the device must be a Chromebook Plus with ChromeOS version 118+ or have at least 3GB RAM. On mobile, the device must run Android 8.0 or higher or iOS 15 or higher.

The company notes that Pixel tablets will now be supported, as well.

Magic Editor is the most notable feature of the group. Introduced last year with the launch of the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, this editing tool uses generative AI to do more complicated photo edits — like filling in gaps in a photo, repositioning the subject and other edits to the foreground or background of a photo. With Magic Editor, you can change a gray sky to blue, remove people from the background of a photo, recenter the photo subject while filling in gaps, remove other clutter and more.

Previously, these kinds of edits would require Magic Eraser and other professional editing tools, like Photoshop, to get the same effect. And those edits would be more manual, not automated via AI.

Image Credits: Google

With the expansion, Magic Editor will come to all Pixel devices, while iOS and Android users (whose phones meet the requirements) will get 10 Magic Editor saves per month. To go beyond that, they’ll still need to buy a Premium Google One plan — meaning 2TB of storage and above.

The other tools will be available to all Google Photos users, no Google One subscription is required. The full set of features that will become available includes Magic Eraser, Photo Unblur, Sky suggestions, Color pop, HDR effect for photos and videos, Portrait Blur, Portrait Light (plus the add light/balance light features in the tool), Cinematic Photos, Styles in the Collage Editor and Video Effects.

Other features like the AI-powered Best Take — which merges similar photos to create a single best shot where everyone is smiling — will continue to be available only to Pixel 8 and 8 Pro.


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Watch: Google's Gemini Code Assist wants to use AI to help developers

April 18, 2024 7:17 PM0


Can AI eat the jobs of the developers who are busy building AI models? The short answer is no, but the longer answer is not yet settled. News this week that Google has a new AI-powered coding tool for developers, straight from the company’s Google Cloud Next 2024 event in Las Vegas, means that competitive pressures between major tech companies to build the best service to help coders write more code, more quickly is still heating up.

Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot service that has similar outlines has been steadily working toward enterprise adoption. Both companies want to eventually build developer-helping tech that can understand a company’s codebase, allowing it to offer up more tailored suggestions and tips.

Startups are in the fight as well, though they tend to focus more tailored solutions than the broader offerings from the largest tech companies; Pythagora, Tusk and Ellipsis from the most recent Y Combinator batch are working on app creation from user prompts, AI agents for bug-squashing and turning GitHub comments into code, respectively.

Everywhere you look, developers are building tools and services to help their own professional cohort.

Developers learning to code today won’t know a world in which they don’t have AI-powered coding helps. Call it the graphic calculator era for software builders. But the risk — or the worry, I suppose — is that in time the AI tools that are ingesting mountains of code to get smarter to help humans do more will eventually be able to do enough that fewer humans are needed to do the work of writing code for companies themselves. And if a company can spend less money and employ fewer people, it will; no job is safe, but some roles are just more difficult to replace at any given moment.

Thankfully, given the complexities of modern software services, ever-present tech debt and an infinite number of edge cases, what big tech and startups are busy building today seem to be very useful coding helps and not something ready to replace or even reduce the number of humans building them. For now. I wouldn’t take the other end of that bet on a multi-decade time frame.

And for those looking for an even deeper dive into what Google revealed this week, you can head here for our complete rundown, including details on exactly how Gemini Code Assist works, and Google’s in-depth developer walkthrough from Cloud Next 2024.


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Google fires 28 employees after sit-in protest over controversial Project Nimbus contract with Israel | TechCrunch

April 18, 2024 4:12 PM0


Google has terminated the employment of 28 employees following a prolonged sit-in protest at the company’s Sunnyvale and New York offices.

The protests were in response to Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract inked by Google and Amazon with the Israeli government and its military three years ago. The controversial project, which also reportedly includes the provision of advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, allegedly has strict contractual stipulations that prevent Google and Amazon from bowing to boycott pressure — this effectively means that they must continue providing services to Israel no matter what.

Conflict

There have been countless protests and public chastising from within the companies’ ranks since 2021, but with the heightening Israel-Palestine conflict in the wake of last October’s attacks by Hamas, this is spilling further into the workforce of corporations deemed not only to be helping Israel, but actively profiteering from the conflict.

While the latest rallies included demonstrations outside Google’s Sunnyvale and New York offices, as well as Amazon’s Seattle HQ, protestors went one step further by going inside the buildings, including the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.

In a statement issued to TechCrunch via anti big-tech advocacy firm Justice Speaks, Hasan Ibraheem, a Google software engineer participating in the New York City sit-in protest, said that by providing cloud and AI infrastructure to the Israeli military, Google is “directly implicated in the genocide of the Palestinian people.”

“It’s my responsibility to do everything I can to end this contract even while Google pretends nothing is wrong,” Ibraheem said. “The idea of working for a company that directly provides infrastructure for genocide makes me sick. We’ve tried sending petitions to leadership but they’ve gone ignored. We will make sure they can’t ignore us anymore. We will make as much noise as possible. So many workers don’t know that Google has this contract with the IOF [Israel Offensive Forces]. So many don’t know that their colleagues have been facing harassment for being Muslim, Palestinian and Arab and speaking out. So many people don’t realize how complicit their own company is. It’s our job to make sure they do.”

Nine Google workers were also arrested and forcibly removed from the company’s offices, four of whom were in New York and five in Sunnyvale. A separate statement issued by Justice Speaks on behalf of the so-called “Nimbus nine” protestors, said that they had demanded to speak with Kurian, a request that went unmet.

The statement reads in full:

“Last night, Google made the decision to arrest us, the company’s own workers — instead of engaging with our concerns about Project Nimbus, the company’s $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with Israel. Those of us sitting in Thomas Kurian’s office repeatedly requested to speak with the Google Cloud CEO, but our requests were denied. Throughout the past three years, since the contract’s signing, we have repeatedly attempted to engage with Google executives about Project Nimbus through company channels, including town halls, forums, petitions signed by over a thousand workers, and direct outreach from concerned workers.

Google executives have ignored our concerns about our ethical responsibility for the impact of our technology as well as the damage to our workplace health and safety caused by this contract, and the company’s internal environment of retaliation, harassment, and bullying. At every turn, instead, Google is repressing speech inside the company, and condoning harassment, intimidation, bullying, silencing, and censorship of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Googlers.

Workers have the right to know how their labor is being used, and to have a say in ensuring the technology they build is not used for harm. Workers also have the right to go to work without fear, anxiety, and stress due to the potential that their labor is being used to power a genocide. Google is depriving us of these basic rights, which is what led us to sit-in at offices across the country yesterday.

Meanwhile, Google continues to lie to its workers, the media, and the public. Google continues to claim, as of yesterday, that Project Nimbus is “not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.” Yet, reporting from TIME Magazine proves otherwise. Google has built custom tools for Israel’s Ministry of Defense, and has doubled down on contracting with the Israeli Occupational Forces, Israel’s military, since the start of its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. By continuing its lies, Google is disrespecting and disregarding consumers, the media, as well as, most importantly, us—its workers.

We will not stay silent in light of Google’s bare-faced lies. Hundreds and thousands of Google workers have joined No Tech for Apartheid’s call for the company to Drop Project Nimbus. Despite Google’s attempts to silence us and disregard our concerns, we will persist. We will continue to organize and fight until Google drops Project Nimbus and stops aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide and apartheid state in Palestine.”

A Google spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that 28 employees were fired, and that it will “continue to investigate and take action” if needed.

“These protests were part of a longstanding campaign by a group of organizations and people who largely don’t work at Google,” the spokesperson said. “A small number of employee protesters entered and disrupted a few of our locations. Physically impeding other employees’ work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and completely unacceptable behavior. After refusing multiple requests to leave the premises, law enforcement was engaged to remove them to ensure office safety.”


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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