Google has rebranded its Bard chatbot as Gemini, and is launching a Gemini mobile app along with a subscription offering for Gemini Advanced that will be included as part of the new $19.95 monthly Google One AI Premium plan. As with Bard, Google will continue to make a free version of the Gemini chatbot available. Gemini Advanced is powered by Gemini Ultra, the most sophisticated of the three Gemini AI models Google unveiled in December. “Gemini Advanced not only allows you to have longer, more detailed conversations, it also better understands the context from your previous prompts,” Google explains. Continue reading Google Intros Gemini Advanced Chatbot, One AI Subscription

During this week’s Unpacked event, Samsung introduced Galaxy AI, a suite of artificial intelligence tools designed for the new Galaxy S series smartphones — the Galaxy S24, Galaxy S24+, and Galaxy S24 Ultra. “AI amplifies nearly every experience on the Galaxy S24 series,” including real-time text and call translations, a powerful suite of creative tools in the ProVisual Engine and a new kind of “gestural search that lets users circle, highlight, scribble on or tap anything onscreen” to see related search results. The AI enhancements are largely enabled by a multiyear deal with Google and Qualcomm. Samsung also debuted a wearable accessory, the Galaxy Ring. Continue reading Unpacked: Samsung Intros Galaxy AI with Next Gen S Phones

Google is rolling out Gemini to developers, enticing them with tools including AI Studio, an easy-to-navigate Web-based platform that will serve as a portal to the multi-tiered Gemini ecosystem, beginning with Gemini Pro, with Gemini Ultra to come next year. The service aims to allow developers to quickly create prompts and Gemini-powered chatbots, providing access to API keys to integrate them into apps. They’ll also be able to access code, should projects require a full featured IDE. The site is essentially a revamped version of what was formerly Google’s MakerSuite. Continue reading Google Debuts Turnkey Gemini AI Studio for Developing Apps

Google is closing the year by heralding 2024 as the “Gemini era,” with the introduction of its “most capable and general AI model yet,” Gemini 1.0. This new foundation model is optimized for three different use-case sizes: Ultra, Pro and Nano. As a result, Google is releasing a new, Gemini-powered version of its Bard chatbot, available to English speakers in the U.S. and 170 global regions. Google touts Gemini as built from the ground up for multimodality, reasoning across text, images, video, audio and code. However, Bard will not as yet incorporate Gemini’s ability to analyze sound and images. Continue reading Google Announces the Launch of Gemini, Its Largest AI Model

Nvidia logged another record quarter, with Q3 revenue of $18.12 billion, up 206 percent from a year ago and a 34 percent increase from Q2 that exceeded both its own and analyst projections. The surge, attributed to increasing demand for the chips that drive artificial intelligence, logged primarily under Nvidia’s data center results a record $14.51 billion, up 279 percent from the prior year and 41 percent from Q2. Profits swelled to $9.2 billion, a stunning 1,259 percent increase from 2022’s $680 million. The results for Nvidia’s Q3 were for the three-month period ending October 31. Continue reading Nvidia Sales Surge as Rivals Circle and China Sanctions Loom

Microsoft Ignite 2023 was all about the transformative change of artificial intelligence, and the event was the setting for Bing Chat’s debut as Bing Copilot. The company also introduced three additional Copilot offerings: Copilot for Azure, Copilot for Service and Copilot in Dynamics 365 Guides. The new Copilot Studio gained tools for connecting Copilots in Microsoft 365 apps — including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, the Edge browser and Windows — to third-party data. In addition, the company showcased software for client-configured chatbots, and introduced its first custom designed AI processor, the Maia 100 chip. Continue reading Microsoft Rebrands Bing as Copilot, Debuts First Custom AI

Microsoft has launched Radius, a language-agnostic collaboration app for creating and running cloud-native applications. Radius sprang from the Microsoft Azure Incubations team, whose projects include the development app Dapr, event-driven autoscaling solution KEDA, and the Copacetic security tool. Dapr and KEDA are among the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects. Microsoft submitted Copacetic to CNCF and plans to submit Radius, which standardizes deployment and automates resource provisioning through features like Recipes and Connections. Continue reading Microsoft’s Radius App is Open Source and Cloud Agnostic

Google DeepMind and Google Cloud have teamed to launch what they claim is an indelible AI watermark tool, which if it works would mark an industry first. Called SynthID, the technique for identifying AI-generated images is being launched in beta. The technology embeds its digital watermark “directly into the pixels of an image, making it imperceptible to the human eye, but detectable for identification,” according to DeepMind. SynthID is being released to a limited number of Google’s Vertex AI customers using Imagen, a Google AI language model that generates photorealistic images. Continue reading Google Introduces an AI Watermark That Cannot Be Removed

Google is making many of its most powerful cloud computing tools available commercially for the first time, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian shared at the company’s Cloud Next ’23 conference in San Francisco. In a bid to catch up with top AI rivals such as Amazon and Microsoft, the Google Distributed Cloud will open for general business including at the edge with Vertex AI and PaLM 2. Google Cloud will serve up AI from Anthropic, in which it is an investor, as well as from Meta Platforms. In addition, an AI-infused Gmail productivity suite is on the way. Continue reading Google Takes on the Competition with Cloud and AI Services

Google has debuted Project IDX, an AI-enabled development environment for building full-stack web and multiplatform apps. Comparing app development that works across mobile, web, and desktop platforms to “building a Rube Goldberg machine” with a duct-taped tech stack, Google says Project IDX smooths the process of compiling, testing, deploying and monitoring apps. The browser-based Project IDX is built on the Google Cloud using the Codey family of AI foundation models built on PaLM 2. Currently, IDX supports the JavaScript and Dart languages, with plans for Python, Go and more. Continue reading Google’s Project IDX Offers Full-Stack Dev in a Web Browser

Alphabet posted a strong second quarter, with Google Cloud revenue climbing 28 percent year-over-year, to $8.03 billion, and overall revenue gaining 7 percent, to $74.6 billion, exceeding analyst expectations, as did the $18 billion in net income. Google Search ad sales grew by nearly 5 percent, to $42.6 billion, while ad sales from Google’s YouTube streaming platform rose almost 4 percent, to $7.7 billion. YouTube had in recent quarters sustained revenue declines, attributed to increased competition from TikTok and others, but was finally able to reverse the downward trend. Continue reading Search Stays Strong and YouTube Rebounds in Alphabet Q2

Apple is reportedly developing tools it could use to enter the artificial intelligence space, joining rivals such as Microsoft and Google, which have already released popular products. In Cupertino, the company is said to have built a framework for large language models, which power AI-based chatbot offerings similar to Google’s Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Called Ajax, the platform is the basis for what is referred to inside the company as Apple GPT. Though Apple has built automation into its products for some time, it could now be preparing to make a direct play for the generative AI market. Continue reading Apple Chatbot ‘Ajax’ Could Be Next Major Player in AI Space

There’s a new kind of cloud on the block, Wing Cloud, which features an open-source code called Winglang that drives cross-platform development across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Kubernetes, among others. Wing Cloud has emerged from stealth mode with $20 million in seed funding and offers “a new kind of abstract cloud” that “doesn’t involve data centers, machines or provisioning engines.” The software-based Wing Cloud visual layer is accessible through a general purpose computing model that operationally unifies infrastructure and application. Continue reading Wing Cloud Develops Unified Open-Source Coding Language

Generative AI for cybersecurity is an emerging category with Google an early entrant. At this week’s RSA Conference 2023 in San Francisco, Google unveiled Cloud Security AI Workbench, a toolkit powered by a customized AI language model called Sec-PaLM that is “fine-tuned for security use cases.” Accenture is the first client to sign up for Workbench. Google also announced it is combining its Google Cloud and Mandiant ecosystems to offer a turnkey solution to ward off threats “from incident response through proactive defense,” drawing on integrations from more than 100 leading cybersecurity vendors. Continue reading Google Workbench Taps AI Tech for Next-Gen Cybersecurity

Google has teamed with San Francisco startup Replit in a bid to challenge Microsoft’s GitHub and the Github Copilot code generator launched in conjunction with OpenAI. Under the new partnership, Replit developers will get access to Google Cloud infrastructure, services, and foundation models via Replit’s software development AI, called Ghostwriter, while Google Cloud and Workspace developers will get access to Replit’s collaborative code editing platform. Replit, which says 20 million developers use its platform, launched Ghostwriter in the fall and in January added a conversational AI interface for generating code and debugging. Continue reading Google Cloud Partners with Replit to Develop AI Coding Tools