Google has terminated the employment of 28 employees following a prolonged sit-in protest at the company’s Sunnyvale and New York offices.
The protests were in response to Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract inked by Google and Amazon with the Israeli government and its military three years ago.
So many workers don’t know that Google has this contract with the IOF [Israel Offensive Forces].
Those of us sitting in Thomas Kurian’s office repeatedly requested to speak with the Google Cloud CEO, but our requests were denied.
Hundreds and thousands of Google workers have joined No Tech for Apartheid’s call for the company to Drop Project Nimbus.
That’s a different strategy from just about every other market, where Google has been merging Wallet and Pay experiences together under a single Wallet app.
We’re continuing to invest in the Google Pay app to give people easy, secure access to digital payments,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch.
Then, it tried to replace the Wallet and its Android Pay app with Google Pay.
In 2022, Google relaunched the Wallet app as its digital wallet platform for Android, Wear OS and Fitbit OS.
However, in February this year, the search giant announced it would replace Google Pay with the Wallet app in the U.S.
This week in Las Vegas, 30,000 folks came together to hear the latest and greatest from Google Cloud.
What they heard was all generative AI, all the time.
Google Cloud is first and foremost a cloud infrastructure and platform vendor.
From Google’s perspective, the company has built generative AI tools to more easily help data engineers build data pipelines to connect to data sources inside and outside of the Google ecosystem.
Executives, IT pros, developers and others who went to GCN this week might have gone looking for what’s coming next from Google Cloud.
Google VidsLeveraging AI to help customers develop creative content is something Big Tech is looking for, and Tuesday, Google introduced its version.
Read moreImagen 2In February, Google announced an image generator built into Gemini, Google’s AI-powered chatbot.
“Vertex AI Agent Builder allows people to very easily and quickly build conversational agents,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said.
Read moreNvidia’s Blackwell platformOne of the anticipated announcements is Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell platform coming to Google Cloud in early 2025.
This, Kyle Wiggers writes, is “Google’s most capable generative AI model,” and is now available in public preview on Vertex AI, Google’s enterprise-focused AI development platform.
On Wednesday, the tech giant announced that a handful of enhanced editing features previously limited to Pixel devices and paid subscribers — including its AI-powered Magic Editor — will now make their way to all Google Photos users for free.
But with the growing number of AI-powered editing tools flooding the market, Google has decided to make its set of AI photo editing features available to more people for free.
Previously, these kinds of edits would require Magic Eraser and other professional editing tools, like Photoshop, to get the same effect.
With the expansion, Magic Editor will come to all Pixel devices, while iOS and Android users (whose phones meet the requirements) will get 10 Magic Editor saves per month.
The other tools will be available to all Google Photos users, no Google One subscription is required.
It’s time for Google’s annual look up to the cloud, this time with a big dose of AI.
At 9 a.m. PT, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian will kick off the opening keynote for this year’s Google Cloud Next event, and you can watch it live right here.
After this week we’ll know more about Google’s attempts to help the enterprise enter the age of AI.
From a deeper dive into Gemini, the company’s AI-powered chatbot, to securing AI products and implementing generative AI into cloud applications, Google plans to cover it all.
Don’t have time to catch the Google Cloud Next livestream?
Here’s whyNvidia’s Blackwell platformOne of the anticipated announcements is Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell platform coming to Google Cloud in early 2025.
Read moreImagen 2In February, Google announced an image generator built into Gemini, Google’s AI-powered chatbot.
Read moreChrome Enterprise PremiumMeanwhile, Google is expanding its Chrome Enterprise product suite with the launch of Chrome Enterprise Premium.
This, Kyle Wiggers writes, is “Google’s most capable generative AI model,” and is now available in public preview on Vertex AI, Google’s enterprise-focused AI development platform.
AI agents are the new hot craze in generative AI.
On Tuesday at Google Cloud Next, the company introduced a new tool to help companies build AI agents.
“Vertex AI Agent Builder allows people to very easily and quickly build conversational agents,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said.
In this case, it’s relying on Google Search (which in reality could or could not be accurate).
“We’re now bringing you grounding in Google Search, bringing the power of the world’s knowledge that Google Search offers through our grounding service to models.
On Tuesday at the Google Cloud Next customer conference in Las Vegas, Google introduced a new AI-fueled video creation tool called Google Vids.
At Google Cloud Next, we’re unveiling Google Vids, a brand new, AI-powered video creation app for work,” Aparna Pappu, VP & GM at Google Workspace said, introducing the tool.
Examples of the kinds of videos people are creating with Google Vids include product pitches, training content or celebratory team videos.
Like most generative AI tooling, Google Vids starts with a prompt.
Along the way colleagues can comment or make changes, just as with any Google Workspace tool.
But this year, whether to foster developer goodwill or advance its ecosystem ambitions (or both), Google debuted a number of open-source tools primarily aimed at supporting generative AI projects and infrastructure.
Beyond MaxDiffusion, Google’s launching Jetstream, a new engine to run generative AI models — specifically text-generating models (so not Stable Diffusion).
“We’ve heavily optimized [the models’] performance on TPUs and also partnered closely with Nvidia to optimize performance on large GPU clusters,” Lohmeyer said.
The goal is to reduce the barrier to entry for getting generative AI models onto TPU hardware, according to Google — in particular text-generating models.
And Optimum TPU doesn’t yet support training generative models on TPUs — only running them.
