• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 29, 2023

Google on Monday announced it will add artificial intelligence tools from companies such as Meta and Anthropic to its cloud platform.

The move will integrate generative AI into its products. It positions the company as a one-stop shop for cloud customers and allows Google’s cloud clients to access Meta’s "Llama 2" large language model, as well as AI startup Anthropic’s "Claude 2" chatbot.

“We are in an entirely new era of digital transformation, fueled by gen AI,” Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, said in a company blog post.

Additional news and changes will be announced at Google’s Next ’23 event, beginning today, which will bring together more than 100 powerful AI models and tools are available to Google Cloud clients, the company said.

An interesting twist in the announcement is collaboration, which signals Google’s willingness to work with other tech companies to gain market share. While Amazon and Microsoft lead in the cloud business, Google hopes the AI additions to its cloud services will give its platform the most advanced models.

Google also said it will make improvements to its own AI models and tools. PaLM 2, Google’s large language model is now available in 38 languages and can better analyze longer documents like research papers, books and legal briefs, the company said. Meanwhile, Google’s AI model that helps with coding, called Codey, has been updated to enhance performance.

Imagen, Google’s text-to-image app, will feature better-quality images and newer capabilities like style tuning, to help cloud customers align their images to brand guidelines.

Google Cloud also confirmed a feature that will embed a watermark to indicate that images were created by artificial intelligence. The feature, which is powered by technology from AI lab Google DeepMind, will include the watermark at the pixel level, meaning it will be hard to alter, the company said.