Generative AI is heading to Google Workspace & Google Cloud

Google increases AI efforts

The company is continuing its push to add artificial intelligence into more products and services in a bid to compete with OpenAI and ChatGPT. Announced on Tuesday, Google is starting with PaLM, Google Cloud, and Google Workspace.

PaLM is a large language model (LLM) similar to the GPT models that OpenAI uses for its products. It can perform multiple tasks for creating and modifying text, and Google has released an API for developers to instruct and customize PaLM to perform particular duties.

To make it easier for developers to train PaLM, Google has also released an app alongside the API called MakerSuite. It helps with prototyping ideas and will have features for prompt engineering, synthetic data generation, and custom-model tuning over time.

Certain developers can access the PaLM API and MakerSuite in Private Preview today, and Google will soon create a waitlist.

For people who aren't developers, the company is also adding AI-powered features to Google Workspace. In Gmail and Google Docs, people can type a topic they want to write about and it will instantly generate a draft.

For example, a manager can greet a new employee with a welcome email, or someone couuld have Google Docs write a job description. From there, users can add or shorten the message and adjust the tone to be more playful or professional.

Google is currently testing the new features with a limited set of people and will roll them out to more testers in the coming weeks.

On the enterprise side, the company is also extending support for generative AI in its Vertex AI platform, which is intended to assist businesses in training and deploying machine learning models. Google Cloud customers can find models, design and alter prompts, tweak them with their data, and release applications that use these technologies.

Finally, Google has launched a new platform called Generative AI App Builder. For enterprise customers that want to build their AI-powered chat interfaces and digital assistants, the App Builder "connects conversational AI flows with out-of-the-box search experiences and foundation models."

In February, Google demonstrated a ChatGPT rival called Bard, but it botched its first demonstration. Bard had made a factual error in response to an example query, which isn't ideal for a chatbot that will enhance Google Search.