Gemini 1.5 Pro, Google’s most capable generative AI model, is now available in public preview on Vertex AI, Google’s enterprise-focused AI development platform.
Gemini 1.5 Pro launched in February, joining Google’s Gemini family of generative AI models.
Gemini 1.5 was incredibly able to find the specific perfect 50 dunk and details from just its long context video understanding!
Gemini 1.5 Pro doesn’t process a million tokens at the snap of a finger.
Google previously said that latency is an area of focus, though, and that it’s working to “optimize” Gemini 1.5 Pro as time goes on.
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.
Google hit with $270M fine in France as authority finds news publishers’ data was used for GeminiIn a never-ending saga between Google and France’s competition authority over copyright protections for news snippets, the Autorité de la Concurrence announced a €250 million fine against the tech giant Wednesday (around $270 million at today’s exchange rate).
The competition authority has found fault with Google for failing to notify news publishers of this GenAI use of their copyrighted content.
But the competition authority quickly stepped in – finding its unilateral action an abuse of a dominant market position that risked harm to publishers.
But in 2021, Google was hit with a $592M fine after the competition authority found major breaches in its negotiations with local publishers and agencies.
Google has signed copyright agreements with hundreds of publishers in France – which fall under the remit of its agreement with the Autorité.
India’s antitrust regulator has ordered an investigation into Alphabet’s Google, alleging the U.S. tech giant abused its dominant position in the country’s online market by imposing unfair terms and discriminatory practices in its popular app store.
The order came in response to complaint filed by multiple Indian app developers and industry groups, many of whom have also publicly raised concerns about what they allege is unfair practices by Google.
CCI’s allegations centre around Google’s billing system for in-app purchases and paid apps on its Play Store.
The watchdog’s decision is the latest headache for Google in India, its biggest market by users but one where it has long faced allegations of anti-competitive practices.
The U.S. giant has previously defended its Play Store policies, saying the service fee supports its investments in Android and Play Store, allowing it to provide developers with tools and a global platform to access billions of consumers around the world.
Sharing URLs privatelyNow, if all of this sounds a bit familiar, then that’s likely because you are already familiar with the Safe Browsing Enhanced Mode.
The privacy server removes potential user identifiers and forwards the encrypted hash prefixes to the Safe Browsing server via a TLS connection that mixes requests with many other Chrome users.
The Safe Browsing server decrypts the hash prefixes and matches them against the server-side database, returning full hashes of all unsafe URLs that match one of the hash prefixes sent by Chrome.
This server sits between Chrome and Safe Browsing and strips out any identifying information from the browser request.
Thanks to all of this, Google’s Safe Browsing service should never see your IP address.
Indian firms whose apps were delisted by Google last week have begrudgingly started to comply with Play Store billing rules to get their apps back on the store.
A lot of protesting developers have opted for a consumption-only model for now, while others have opted for the Google Play billing.
And what about alternate app stores like the recently launched Indus app store from PhonePe?” Janakiraman told the publication.
Google also noted that the company has given developers three years to comply with Play Store rules.
Firms seeking regulatory actionThe firms that are protesting against Google’s move are looking for regulatory intervention.
Pixel phone updatesThe company is now allowing users to capture and upload 10-bit HDR videos on Instagram.
This feature is available to users on the Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro, and Pixel Fold.
Later in the month, the company made the feature available to Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro users.
Google today said the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro users will be able to use this feature soon.
Pixel Watch updatesGoogle is rolling out two updates to the original Pixel Watch to help users train better, namely Pace training and Heart Zone training.
Elsewhere, Mistral, the French AI startup, launched a new model to rival OpenAI’s GPT-4 — and its own cheekily named chatbot dubbed Le Chat.
NewsApple car canceled: Apple has scuttled its secretive, long-running effort to build an autonomous electric car.
Bumble stumbles: Bumble posted weak Q4 results showing a $32 million net loss and $273.6 million in revenue — below Wall Street expectations.
Google’s AI goes awry: Google has apologized for an embarrassing AI blunder this week: An image-generating model that injected diversity into pictures with a farcical disregard for historical context.
PodcastsOn Equity, the crew talked through startup news from Microsoft and Mistral AI, Thrasio and Glean — and also covered happenings over at COTU Ventures and Zacua Ventures.
Why some VCs are pulling back from Europe, Google’s AI push, and who is the CEO of Byju’s?
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is our Monday show, in which we take a look back at the weekend and what’s ahead in the week.
We also had an extra episode this weekend digging into the Reddit IPO that you can find here.
On the pod this morning, here’s what we got into:For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website.
Google’s proposed “Findings of Fact” filing documents the history of search competition, including Google’s own beginnings, its innovations, the competitive landscape, Google’s search ads business, distribution agreements, and more.
When shareholders sold stock to various VC firms, those funds were not used to improve the search engine, the filing argues.
But it contradicts this point, too, noting that a third of DuckDuckGo’s 50 employees in 2018 were working on improving the search engine, for example.
The search engine receives only about 2.5% of general search queries in the U.S., despite estimates that 10% of people in the U.S. claim to be users.
This, DuckDuckGo’s leadership had explained, is due to the fact that people often use its search engine for some, but not all of their search queries.
