Google has announced a host of generative AI-powered features for Cloud developers, headlined by Duet AI – a new cloud experience that adapts to your needs and goals, and can deeply understand your environment to help you create secure, scalable applications, while offering expert advice. The company has also announced three new foundation models for Vertex AI - Codey, Imagen, and Chirp. Let's take a look at what these are. Duet AI for Google Cloud developers Powered by Google’s latest generative AI foundation models, Duet AI for Google Cloud is described by the company as being an “AI-powered collaborator that provides help to users of all skill levels where they need it.” Let’s take a look at the features it introduces. Available through multiple products and services across Google Cloud, such as Cloud Workstations and Cloud Console, code assistance helps application developers and data engineers code faster using AI. The feature gives code recommendations in realtime, generates full functions and code blocks, and identifies vulnerabilities and errors in the code, while suggesting fixes. Supported languages include Go, Java, Javascript, Python, and SQL. Meanwhile, Chat assistance allows people to use simple prompts to get answers to specific development or cloud-related questions. “Users can engage with chat assistance to get real-time guidance on various topics, such as how to use certain cloud services or functions, or get detailed implementation plans for their cloud projects,” reads Google’s press release. This feature will be available across multiple Google Cloud surface areas like IDEs, the Cloud Console, and through products and services. Finally, Duet AI for AppSheet will let users create intelligent business applications, connect their data, and build workflows into Google Workspace via natural language. These early features of Duet AI for Google Cloud are available to a select group of users today but access will be expanded soon. To sign up, you’ll have to enrol in Google Cloud’s AI Trusted Tester Program. Codey, Imagen, Chirp language models After unveiling Gen App Builder and Generative AI support in Vertex AI back in March – a platform that helps fast-track machine learning model development – Google is back with another announcement that builds on these offerings. At I/O 2023, the search engine giant announced three new foundation models for Vertex AI that can be accessed via API in Generative AI Studio – Codey, Imagen, and Chirp. Codey is a text-to-code foundation model that can be embedded in an SDK or application. It accelerates software development with code completion and generation in realtime and is customisable with customer’s own codebase. 20+ languages are supported Go, Google Standard SQL, Java, Javascript, Python, and Typescript. Codey also includes a bot that can help with learning new concepts, debugging, and documentation. Imagen has been in development for a couple of years now, with the company demonstrating its capabilities around the same time last year. Now, the company is making the text-to-image foundation model available for customers to generate and edit high-quality images for any business need. With Vertex AI, organisations can even customise and adapt Imagen to their business needs. Chirp is a speech-to-text foundation model that helps organisations interact with their customers more deeply and more inclusively, in their native language. In addition to these, Google is also offering RLHF – a tuning feature that lets organisations “incorporate human feedback to train a reward model that can be used to finetune foundation models.” Codey, Imagen, Embeddings API for images, and RLHF are available in Vertex AI through Google’s trusted tester program, while Chirp is available in preview in Vertex AI to everyone with a Google Cloud account.
