Weekly Issue: 2024-15

In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, the demand for high-performance, cost-efficient AI inference (serving) has never been greater. This week we announced two new open source software offerings: JetStream and MaxDiffusion.  JetStream is a new inference engine for XLA devices, starting with Cloud TPUs.

It’s a great time for organizations innovating with AI. Google recently launched Gemini, our largest and most capable AI model, followed by Gemma, a family of lightweight, state-of-the art open models built from research and technology that we used to create the Gemini models.

Generative AI offers the opportunity to build more interactive, personalized, and complete experiences for your customers, even if you don’t have specialized AI/ML expertise.

How do you store the entire internet? That’s the problem our engineering team set out to solve in 2004 when it launched Bigtable, one of Google’s longest serving and largest data storage systems.

On this week’s episode of The Chrome Cast podcast, we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming with a discussion about wrapping up our Chromebook Plus reviews and an exciting exclusive demo of the upcoming Chromebook Plus AI features.

Thanks to a pretty cool find by @cajl_jbmm over on X (formerly Twitter), we’ve been made aware of a small-but-important new feature on the way for Chromebooks.

For this post, I went to the storage room and pulled out one of the first Chromebook Plus models we reviewed just to reacquaint myself a bit.

Human insights platform company UserTesting Inc. today launched a new feedback engine and enhancements to its artificial intelligence capabilities that help organizations capture and analyze feedback and activate insights.

Starburst Data Inc., which sells a commercial version of the open-source Trino distributed query engine, today announced a fully managed Icehouse data lake on its Galaxy cloud. Icehouse is an open-source lakehouse that combines Trino and Apache Iceberg storage.

6 helpful tips to feel even more productive with your Chromebook

It’s clear that for the past decade, the media and entertainment industry has been undergoing a significant transformation. Still, consumers continue to demand more personalized and diverse entertainment offerings.

Google has added a new way for Workspace users to access generative AI (genAI) features for collaboration without requiring a full subscription to its Gemini AI assistant.

Connected, data-intensive and ubiquitous, endpoint devices — ranging from PCs and smartphones to internet of things (IoT) devices — are among the most valuable IT assets an organization can have.

If you’ve spent much time wading around this warbly ol’ web of ours lately, you might be feeling a teensy sense of unease over your internet browsing history.

Paying for browsers is no longer a memory from the 1990s Cloud Next  Hoping to upsell freeloading corporate users of its Chrome browser, Google has announced Chrome Enterprise Premium – which comes with a dash of AI security sauce for just $6 per user per month.…

Hello from sunny Las Vegas, where we kicked off Google Cloud Next ’24 today! What happened in Vegas on the first day of Next? In a word, AI. Read on for highlights of the day.

It’s finally here – Google has started rolling out its revamped Find My Device network, and it’s looking seriously powerful. This update is basically Android’s equivalent to Apple’s Find My network, letting you track stuff down even when it’s not connected to the internet.

I’ve been a bit tough on the ChromeOS team of late. From updates with ghost “new features” to the missing AI toys we were promised all the way back in October as Chromebook Plus was launched, I’ve not been shy about calling out Google on these things.

The Privacy Sandbox initiative aims to create technologies that both protect people’s privacy online and give companies and developers tools to build thriving digital businesses. The Privacy Sandbox reduces cross-site and cross-app tracking while helping to keep online content and services free for all.

Google Sheets lets you design spreadsheets with sophisticated features, and one of the most useful to know is dropdown lists.

As far as the new Chromebook Plus models go, I clearly have my favorites.

Everywhere you look, there is an undeniable excitement about AI. We are thrilled, but not surprised, to see Google Cloud’s managed containers taking a pivotal role in this world-shaping transformation.

Advancements in AI are unlocking use-cases previously thought impossible. Larger and more complex AI models are enabling powerful capabilities across a full range of applications involving text, code, images, videos, voice, music, and more.

Generative AI’s capabilities have grown tremendously over the past year, and the pledge we made to infuse generative AI across Google Cloud to make our products and services helpful for all users is now a reality.

Welcome to Google Cloud Next. We last came together just eight months ago at Next 2023, but since then, we have made well over a year’s progress innovating and transforming with our customers and partners. We have introduced over a thousand product advances across Google Cloud and Workspace.

Generative AI is transforming software development with tools that automate tasks, foster collaboration, and spark innovation. Its ability to boost creativity and productivity for developers is undeniable. We’re empowering developers with products to maximize generative AI’s potential, both in streamlining their work and building their own AI-powered applications.

Today, customers are looking for entirely new ways to process and analyze data, discover hidden insights, increase productivity and build entirely new applications — all with AI at the core.

Today at Google Cloud Next, we are announcing a new frontline of defense for organizations: Chrome Enterprise Premium, an offering that can help simplify and strengthen endpoint security.

We are witnessing a rapid pace of innovation all around us.

Protecting people, data, and critical assets is a crucial responsibility for modern organizations, yet conventional security approaches often struggle to address the escalating velocity, breadth, and intricacy of modern cyberattacks. Bolting on more new security products is simply not a viable long-term strategy.

Ethos-U85 microNPU boasts 4x performance boost over previous gen Arm is aiming to boost AI performance at the edge with its latest embedded neural processing unit (NPU) and a Reference Design Platform for it to slot into, and said it expects to see devices based on it running generative AI models next year.…

In a world where Chromebooks have matured and gotten really good over the last few years, something like the Lenovo Chromebox Micro has been a breath of fresh air.

Today is the day, folks! The highly anticipated total solar eclipse of 2024 is set to be a major event, and even if you’re not planning a road trip to the path of totality, you can still have a front-row seat.

Generative AI (gen AI) is well on its way to transforming…well, just about everything. Over the last year, I’ve had the opportunity to meet and speak with hundreds of partners and customers on the topic.

This week, we’ve seen the number of Chromebook deals on offer take a pretty sharp decline. It was destined to happen, though, given the fact that we’ve had 8-10 devices on sale for months at this point.