News

From Hugging Face to Chrome AI Updates, Google Floods the Zone

• By David Ramel
• 01/30/2024

Google has been a pioneer in the modern era of artificial intelligence, but let's face it: the search engine giant was a little slow off the blocks in the current AI race. The company was reportedly blindsided by the Microsoft/OpenAI partnership and the resulting Copilot product blitz that gave Redmond a solid AI lead among the cloud giants. But the initial shock wore off, fast, and CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly declared a "code red" last year—which seems to have borne fruit, as a recent spate of AI-related announcement from the Googleplex shows.

Hugging Face Partnership
This platform offers a wide range of tools and resources to help users build and deploy their own AI models. Google announced a strategic partnership to help developers train and serve large AI models more quickly and cost-effectively on Google Cloud in several different ways including:

• Giving developers a way to train, tune, and serve Hugging Face models with Vertex AI in just a few clicks from the Hugging Face platform, so they can easily utilize Google Cloud's purpose-built, end-to-end MLOps services to build new gen AI applications.
• Supporting Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) deployments, so developers on Hugging Face can also train, tune, and serve their workloads with "do it yourself" infrastructure and scale models using Hugging Face-specific Deep Learning Containers on GKE.
• Providing more open-source developers with access to Cloud TPU v5e, which offers up to 2.5x more performance per dollar and up to 1.7x lower latency for inference compared to previous versions.
• Adding future support for A3 VMs, powered by NVIDIA's H100 Tensor Core GPUs, which offer 3x faster training and 10x greater networking bandwidth compared to the prior generation.
• Utilizing Google Cloud Marketplace to provide simple management and billing for the Hugging Face managed platform, including Inference, Endpoints, Spaces, AutoTrain, and others.

Chrome GenAI Experiments
Chrome is getting 3 new generative AI features, including:

• Smartly organize your tabs: "With Tab Organizer, Chrome will automatically suggest and create tab groups based on your open tabs."
• Create your own themes with AI: "You'll be able to quickly generate custom themes based on a subject, mood, visual style and color that you choose -- no need to become an AI prompt expert!"
• Get help drafting things on the web: "In next month's Chrome release, we'll launch another experimental AI-powered feature to help you write with more confidence on the web -- whether you want to leave a well-written review for a restaurant, craft a friendly RSVP for a party or make a formal inquiry about an apartment rental."

Text to Video
"We introduce Lumiere -- a text-to-video diffusion model designed for synthesizing videos that portray realistic, diverse and coherent motion -- a pivotal challenge in video synthesis," Google describes the research project described as "A Space-Time Diffusion Model for Video Generation" on its site. Google pointed to research on the tech-heavy project.

In layperson's terms, it can generate images in response to text prompts or user-supplied images. The site lets users hover over videos to see the prompts that generated them ("Toy poodle dog rides a penny board outdoors"). It can also do stylized generation, video stylization, cinemgraphs and inpainting, which are explained in the announcement. It's not yet available to the public.