Building the most open and innovative AI ecosystem
Kevin Ichhpurani
President, Global Partner Organization, Google Cloud
The future of artificial intelligence (AI) will be open. New and innovative capabilities in areas like generative AI will come from all corners of the technology ecosystem and from companies distributed around the globe — from early stage startups to cloud-native AI platforms to large, global enterprises. The momentum in this space is incredible. In fact, we've seen a significant acceleration in the number of AI startups that have joined the Google for Startups Cloud Program in 2023.
To help customers and developers harness this innovation, we’re bringing the best of Google’s infrastructure, AI products, and foundation models to partners at every layer of the AI stack: chipmakers, companies building foundation models and AI platforms, technology partners enabling companies to develop and deploy machine learning (ML) models, app-builders solving customer use-cases with generative AI, and global services and consulting firms that help enterprise customers implement all of this technology at scale.
Today, alongside exciting new Generative AI support in Vertex AI, Generative AI App Builder, and Google Workspace that we’re unveiling, we’re also announcing new partnerships, programs, and resources for each segment of the ecosystem that showcase our open approach.
Foundation models and platforms
Companies like Anthropic and Cohere are building foundation models, including LLMs, that can significantly accelerate the development of generative AI and natural language processing (NLP) applications. Google Cloud offers these model builders high-performance infrastructure with industry-leading efficiency for both training and serving foundation models.
As the preferred cloud provider for both Anthropic and Cohere, our cloud infrastructure and GPU and Cloud Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) clusters are helping train LLMs more quickly and sustainably, and providing the massive computational capability required for large-scale AI research and development. Anthropic and Cohere, along with all our AI customers, have access to Google Cloud’s AI, including large model offerings, and the same infrastructure that powers YouTube and Google Search.
Through our open approach to the AI ecosystem, any partners building foundation models have access to the best of Google Cloud. Today, we’re announcing that three more leading companies building and training exciting foundation models and generative AI platforms are coming to Google Cloud: AI21Labs, Midjourney, and Osmo.
AI21 Labs, a startup aiming to fundamentally change the way people read and write using generative AI, provides API access to large language models that power text generation and comprehension features in thousands of live applications. AI21 leverages Google Cloud infrastructure including GPUs and TPUs for training and inference, and we are working together to solve customer use-cases such as NLP queries for analytics.
Midjourney is a community-supported research lab providing AI-powered creative tools that produce images using natural written language. Members of the community use a special AI-powered creative process that interweaves words and images to create stunning imagery and explore new worlds. Midjourney uses Google Cloud infrastructure, TPUs, and GPU VMs to train its cutting-edge AI models and empower its community of free expression.
Osmo is a startup focused on helping computers detect and understand scents through unique AI models and mapping technology. The Osmo team is using Vertex AI and Google’s Data Cloud to train its models, process huge amounts of data quickly, and scale its operations as needed. You can go here to learn more about the importance of Osmo’s work in digital olfaction and how Google Cloud AI, ML, and data cloud capabilities are supporting their mission.
The work of these teams, underpinned by Google Cloud, will bring the power of generative AI to more application developers, drive a new wave of creativity and user-created content, and help customers bring AI into important projects.
Technology partners
Organizations and developers undertaking ambitious AI projects typically deploy multiple solutions to help build, manage, and deploy their own models. These tools help developers handle important tasks like labeling unstructured data, observing model performance, or scaling model training workloads. Google Cloud works with these organizations to solve critical needs of machine learning engineers and data scientists. We also offer them new ways to reach customers through the Google Cloud Marketplace, and integrate them with industry-leading data and AI platforms, BigQuery and Vertex AI.
To meet growing demand from developers building generative AI models on Google Cloud, many of the leaders in AI solutions are launching new or expanded partnerships with Google Cloud today. These include:
Aible is bringing its platform for AI-driven data science and data analytics to Google Cloud Marketplace so customers can quickly and seamlessly deploy Aible on Google Cloud. Aible leverages Google Cloud to bring serverless architecture and a unique augmented approach to analytics and data science use cases across user types while realizing significant cost efficiencies. Aible also uses Vertex AI to train its models and brings the power of Vertex AI into the hands of business users.
Anyscale will expand its partnership with Google Cloud to accelerate enterprise adoption of Ray, its open source AI/ML framework. Both companies will jointly provide dedicated expertise and best practices that will ensure customers can deploy Ray and adopt the Anyscale Platform on Google Cloud with security and governance at enterprise scale. This collaboration enables customers to use Ray to fine-tune, train, and deploy large Python ML models easily, leading to faster time-to-market and a competitive advantage. We continue to see more customers like Spotify design their ML platforms on Google Cloud using Ray.
Gretel is making a native integration available for Vertex AI and BigQuery, and launching on Google Cloud Marketplace, enabling developers to train models safely with its multi-modal synthetic data platform.
Labelbox and Google Cloud are partnering to enable developers using Vertex AI to accelerate model development and leverage BigQuery to unlock the business value within unstructured data and build more effective ML models. As part of this collaboration, Labelbox natively integrates with both BigQuery and Vertex AI.
Snorkel AI and Google Cloud are partnering to help enterprises harness the power of large language models to solve real-world problems with production-level accuracy. Together, we're empowering data scientists to quickly generate high-quality training data over complex, unstructured data sources, train custom ML models, or fine-tune pre-built models including the latest LLMs and foundation models, and rapidly deploy ML models into production. As part of this collaboration, Snorkel Flow integrates natively with BigQuery and plugs seamlessly into Vertex AI.
Weights & Biases is deepening its partnership with Google Cloud on MLOps, and will roll out new enhancements to its platform that will enable ML engineers to easily scale their existing, local ML training activities into cloud-based enterprise workloads, utilizing TPUs, GPUs, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Vertex AI.
By supporting these critical technology partners, we offer developers the best platform and ecosystem in which to build the next generation of helpful AI applications, and provide customers with a single destination for building, innovating with, and applying AI.
Application providers leveraging generative AI
Google Cloud is the destination for developers and partners to build the next generation of innovative applications with AI and ML, including exciting new generative AI capabilities. Developers have access to Google Cloud’s infrastructure, multiple go-to-market resources including our Solution Connect program for ISVs, and new cloud credits and resources specifically tailored to startups building with generative AI.
To further support these partners and accelerate their app development, we’re launching a new initiative, called Built with Google Cloud AI, which recognizes select partners whose applications and platforms are optimized to run as-a-service on Google Cloud infrastructure and who are utilizing Google Cloud’s AI capabilities in new and helpful ways. The new Built with Google Cloud AI initiative helps ISVs get started building applications using Google Cloud AI services. The program provides dedicated access to Google Cloud expertise, training, and co-marketing support to help partners build capacity and go to market. Furthermore, Google Cloud engineering teams will work closely with our partners in this program on product design and optimization, as well as architecture patterns and best practices.
Several partners are joining the initiative today, including Bending Spoons, Faraday, Glean, Replit, and Tabnine, all of whom are delivering applications for customers by leveraging our portfolio of AI services.
Bending Spoons, a leading developer of SaaS and mobile applications, is partnering with Google Cloud and leveraging Google’s AI infrastructure for generative AI use cases across its portfolio of products.
Faraday’s platform for no-code AI marketing and consumer predictions is now available on Google Cloud Marketplace. Customers can utilize BigQuery ML alongside Faraday’s platform to apply AI for better insight into consumer behavior and to better inform marketing campaigns.
Glean is an AI platform for next-generation enterprise search and knowledge discovery. With 100+ app connectors, Glean uses deep learning and LLMs to understand enterprise knowledge and pairs this with a custom knowledge graph to deliver highly relevant, highly contextual answers to employees’ questions. Glean leverages a combination of Google Cloud’s infrastructure and AI services as part of its tech stack.
Replit is one of the fastest-growing developer platforms in the world, with 20 million-plus users. Google Cloud and Replit are working together to advance generative AI for code and software development. Replit will bring Google Cloud AI and infrastructure to millions of developers globally as part of this collaboration.
Tabnine provides a leading solution for secure generative AI in coding. It acts as an AI code assistant, which integrates seamlessly with modern IDEs and offers dependable code completion capabilities to increase developers’ efficiency.
Partners can go here to learn more about the Built with Google Cloud AI initiative and requirements.
In addition, much innovation in the generative AI space comes from fast moving, early stage startups. AI startups like Elai.io, Aiva.ai, and Cradle, are choosing Google Cloud for industry-leading data and AI solutions and fully-managed and serverless infrastructure, which makes it faster and easier to scale. To enable more AI-first startups, we’re expanding the Google for Startups Cloud Program with exclusive benefits for AI startups (seed to series A):
More than double the amount of cloud credits: We’re offering AI-first startups up to $250,000 USD in cloud credits for their first year — 2.5x the amount we typically offer startups in their first year. In their second year in the program, we’ll cover 20% of their cloud costs up to $100,000 USD.
Technical support: AI startups are innovating quickly, so we’re providing credits to allow them to obtain access to fast, high-quality Customer Care plans to accelerate onboarding and implementation with Google Cloud.
Access to Google Cloud experts and community: Startups in the program will get access to Google Cloud success managers, customer engineers, and networking events with the startup community.
Interested AI startups can go here to apply to join the program and register for the upcoming Google Cloud Startup Summit, taking place on April 25.
Consulting and implementation services
AI and ML capabilities are creating profound value for enterprises, for example: helping businesses predict and mitigate disruptions to global supply chains, more sustainably procure products from deforestation-free sources, and optimize store operations to deliver better experiences for millions of daily shoppers. These kinds of industry-specific use cases illustrate how innovations in AI can translate into business outcomes, and our consulting partners are at the forefront of helping enterprise customers accelerate and scale their AI projects.
Today, several of our leading partners, Accenture, BCG, Deloitte, McKinsey, Quantiphi, and TCS are committing to significantly grow the Google Cloud AI and generative AI advisory and implementation services and capabilities available to customers. These partners already play a critical role helping enterprises adopt Google Cloud AI services like Vertex AI, Contact Center AI, Document AI, and Vision AI. Moving forward, they will play an equally essential role applying new generative AI capabilities to solve industry-specific challenges and helping enterprises build generative AI into their products and everyday business processes.
At Google Cloud, we are dedicated to being the most open hyperscale cloud provider, and that includes our AI ecosystem. Through partnerships, we can help organizations more easily access and innovate with generative AI and large language models, apply fast-evolving AI and ML capabilities to address real industry use cases, and build a new wave of applications utilizing all of these capabilities.
You can read more about our exciting updates to bring generative AI to developers, businesses, and governments here.
