News
From Hugging Face to Chrome AI Updates, Google Floods the Zone
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.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer for Converge360.