Google Cloud Next 2024: Building an AI advantage

(Image credit: Future)

This week has seen Google Cloud’s annual Next conference in full swing, with the hyperscaler having made major announcements on generative AI and the infrastructure necessary to support it.

Having spent the past year playing catch-up with Microsoft and OpenAI, Google Cloud is now in a place where it’s ready to press its advantage in AI, years after the company first declared itself “AI first”. But has it succeeded in this mission, and if so – what are the tangible benefits for Google Cloud customers?

In this episode, recorded live at Google Cloud Next 2024 Rory speaks to Bola Rotibi, Chief of Enterprise Research, CCS Insight, to explore some of the most notable trends at the event and unpack why Google has a strong advantage in the AI space.

Highlights

“What's been actually really kind of interesting, from my perspective, is actually seeing a lot of the terms that Google's pushed out, like ‘grounded in search’, ‘grounded in your data’, which I thought was quite interesting because it's really trying to reinforce their heritage and they really leaned into their data heritage, the supporting infrastructure, the platform.”

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“The IT world, or just the world in general has always got lots and lots of different players. The fact is that they've done a lot of work, a lot of optimization, they've got their own models but they absolutely recognize that other people will want different models. So they want third-party models and they want open source models, they want their own models. So [Google Cloud has] relationships with Anthropic, Hugging Face, all of these kinds of things and they want to give all of those opportunities and flexibility of choice.”

“What they've really pushed also is the story of a lot of clients that were initially on other cloud platforms. So they've come through and they've come through via the data analytics, the strength of Google's data infrastructure and the amount of work that they've done over the decades.”

Footnotes

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Rory Bathgate is Features and Multimedia Editor at ITPro, overseeing all in-depth content and case studies. He can also be found co-hosting the ITPro Podcast with Jane McCallion, swapping a keyboard for a microphone to discuss the latest learnings with thought leaders from across the tech sector.

In his free time, Rory enjoys photography, video editing, and good science fiction. After graduating from the University of Kent with a BA in English and American Literature, Rory undertook an MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies at King’s College London. He joined ITPro in 2022 as a graduate, following four years in student journalism. You can contact Rory at rory.bathgate@futurenet.com or on LinkedIn.

Highlights

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