The Week in AI: Updates from Anthropic, IBM, Google Cloud, Juniper Networks, More -- Pure AI

The Week in AI: Updates from Anthropic, IBM, Google Cloud, Juniper Networks, More

By Pure AI Editors
05/20/2024

This edition of our weekly roundup of AI products and services includes Google's new accessibility enhancements and updates to Gemini and Gemma, Anthropic's new iOS app, enhancements to Juniper Networks' AI-native networking platform, Rockset's native support for hybrid search, and Anthropic launches Claude for iOS.

Google announced updates to its Gemini Pro 1.5, introducing 1.5 Flash to its AI-powered chatbot, and rolled out new developer features. It also announced two new Gemma models. The company announced the updates at its annual I/O conference last week. Both Gemini Pro and Gemma were
built from the same research and technology used to create the Gemini models. Gemini 1.5 Flash is available in public preview in Google's AI studio and Vertex AI. Gemma 2, which has been optimized for TPUs and GPUs and is launching at 27B parameters, will be available in June, the company says.

IBM expanded its open-source quantum software engineering toolkit, Qiskit to cover the entire software development stack. With this expansion the company aims to better equip developers with the ability to build practical solutions for quantum processors for both research and enterprise applications. Qiskit was developed to make it easier to get started in quantum computing, the company says, and it accomplishes this goal through "Qiskit patterns," which are "intuitive, repeatable sets of steps for quantum workflows." These patterns are modular, and they can be combined in different ways to achieve different goals, the company says. Qiskit SDK v1.0 is the newest stable release of the toolkit.

Google announced the rollout of eight new accessibility features across its products and platform that were "built together with and for people with disabilities," the company said. It announced the beta of Lookout on Android, which helps people with blindness and low vision use their phone’s camera to get more information about the world around them. The Android app Look to Speak allows users to select pre-written, customizable phrases with their eyes and have them spoken aloud. And developers can now access Project Gameface for Android devices via Github, allowing them to build apps that let users customize facial expressions, gesture sizes, cursor speed and more with the help of Accessibility Service for Android and Google MediaPipe.

Juniper Networks announced enhancements to its AI-Native Networking Platform. These enhancements include capabilities that proactively address network, application, and security issues. The platform enhancements further elevate Juniper's wired and wireless access solutions, the company says. The Juniper's cloud-hosted Wired, Wireless, and Access Assurance products, which are driven by Mist AI, have been updated alongside the company's Marvis AI-native virtual network assistant. These updates allow customers to predict and resolve issues, improving operational efficiency and reducing costs by up to 85% in some cases, the company says.

Real-time analytics database platform provider Rockset Inc. announced native support for hybrid search that incorporates vector search and text search along with metadata filtering into a single query. The new hybrid search capability does everything in one query, the company says, permitting developers to call on a vector search, a keyword search, metadata filtering and geospatial data all at the same time. Rockset can now apply indexed ranking systems at the same time, delivering a powerful response for AI applications to understand the data that’s being retrieved, the company says.

Anthropic has brought its AI chatbot, Claude, to the iPhone. The app is free for all Claude users, including those on free plans. Although it's currently exclusive to iOS, an Android version is in development, according to Anthropic's product manager Scott White. The decision to release a mobile app was driven by user data, the company says. Despite lagging behind competitors such as OpenAI's ChatGPT app, the Claude app boasts polished features, including: availability for all user tiers (free, Pro, and Team); seamless sync across multiple devices; visual capabilities for real-time image analysis. Additionally, Anthropic introduced a new Team Plan, offering higher usage limits, access to the full Claude 3 suite, a 200k context window, and enhanced admin tools. The Team Plan, designed for teams of five or more, costs $30 per user per month and includes all Pro tier benefits.

Google Cloud has introduced Trillium, its sixth-generation TPU, its most powerful and energy-efficient TPU to date. Trillium TPUs offer a 4.7X increase in peak compute performance per chip compared to the previous TPU v5e, with doubled High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and Interchip Interconnect (ICI) bandwidth. Equipped with third-generation SparseCore, these TPUs excel in processing ultra-large embeddings for advanced workloads. Trillium TPUs were designed to enhance model training speed, reduce latency, and lower costs. They're 67% more energy-efficient than their predecessors, the company says. These TPUs can scale up to 256 units in a high-bandwidth, low-latency pod and, with multislice technology and Titanium Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs), can scale to hundreds of pods. This scalability connects tens of thousands of chips in a supercomputer via a multi-petabit-per-second datacenter network. Trillium TPUs are part of Google Cloud's AI Hypercomputer, which integrates performance-optimized infrastructure, open-source software frameworks, and flexible consumption models. This includes support for open-source libraries like JAX, PyTorch/XLA, and Keras 3, and partnerships with companies like Hugging Face for streamlined model training and serving.