AI: Google's well-'Grounded' AI Strategy. RTZ #323

...Google Cloud's 'Next' strategy with Gemini shows the road to Google winning AI the 'Google Way'

Google showed off its AI Gemini Strategy with aplomb at its ‘Next’ Conference this week to over 30,000 attendees. Present were Google Cloud’s enterprise customers large and small. Google Cloud CEO Tom Kurian and his team did a credible and comprehensive job from the Keynote on. And Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai kicking off the proceedings and introducing the overall AI theme and focus.

The whole strategy continues to show the road to how in my view Google has a very ‘Grounded’ path to ‘winning’ the LLM AI challenge, leveraging its core Search and other Google assets with its global scale and market share.

It all well-positions Google despite aggressive competition from OpenAI/Microsoft, Anthropic/Amaxon AWS, and dozens of other competitors over the next 2-3 years. Particularly as the AI Tech Wave gets into gear for Enterprise customers worldwide. Most of the products, services and initiatives announced were targeted at direct Cloud competitors like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, and many others.

Additionally, CEO Kurian also pointed out the many ways Google Cloud will leverage its partnerships with Nvidia. Particularly with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s strategy around DGX, Omniverse and other core Nvidia AI data center products and strategies. Especially with Nvidia’s next generation Blackwell AI GPUs coming later this year and next.

While there’s a lot of notable Google AI strategy details to digest from the links above, the core items were well summarized by Axios, around Google smartly ‘Grounding’ its AI strategy around it’s core competency, and biggest asset, Google Search. They say it well in “Google drafts search engine to "ground" AI results in truth”:

“Google is launching a new effort Tuesday that will let businesses use results from its flagship search engine to help "ground" the results of generative AI queries.”

“Why it matters: The tendency of large language models to hallucinate, or make things up, is a key hurdle to broader business adoption of generative AI.”

“Driving the news: Google is announcing the "grounding" effort as part of a slew of announcements at its three-day Google Cloud Next conference, which kicks off later on Tuesday.”

• “Google says that by integrating Google search into Vertex, its AI offering for businesses, it can give users access to more recent information and citations indicating the sources for key data.”

• “Microsoft has also aimed to use its Bing search engine to help offer citations along with answers returned by its Copilot chatbot.”

• “Google allows businesses to "ground" results from AI queries using their own data, though that effort is at an earlier stage. Google announced new connections to Workday and Salesforce data, with plans to add more options over time.”

“The big picture: Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told Axios there has been a big shift in how companies are approaching generative AI.”

• "Last year, companies were feeling a lot of pressure to adopt generative AI given all the hype and noise," Kurian said. "So they experimented [with] a bunch of things."

• “Now they are trying to figure out which uses are really ready for widespread employment. "The biggest shift I see is systematically people are going from pilot to actual production deployment," Kurian said.”

Industry analyst Stratechery summarizes it all well with:

“It was impossible to miss the leading message at yesterday’s Google Cloud Next keynote: Google has the best infrastructure for AI.”

Their interview with Google CEO Tom Kurian also worth the read for those wanting more granular detail.

Also notable was Google’s rollout of Axion, it’s next generation AI server chips for its Cloud Data centers.

But overall, Google’s Enterprise strategy with AI ‘grounded’ in Google Search and other core products, underlines my comfort with Google more than holding its own in the AI race in Search and other Google core services. Regardless how slow it starts. The race has begun, and Google’s in it to win it. Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)