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Google makes Gemini Pro available in AI Studio, Vertex AI tools
Google's AI Studio is a Web-based code editor for individuals and small teams that will let an individual throw together an app using mostly natural-language prompting.
Google on Wednesday morning announced its top-of-the-line artificial intelligence program, Gemini, unveiled last week, will be available as a preview version of the "Pro" version of Gemini immediately to users of its AI Studio programming tool, and its fully managed programming tool for enterprises, Vertex AI, running in Google Cloud.
The company is also making Gemini available "over the next few weeks" in Duet AI, its coding tool enhanced with generative AI, which it announced became generally available Wednesday.
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"Gemini is trained and part of a broad AI hyper-computing infrastructure," said Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in a press briefing, referring to the company's custom AI chip, the Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU. "This is the infrastructure we're offering not just internally but now to customers."
Part of Wednesday's announcement was the general availability of TPU v5p, which increases the performance of TPUs by four times over the existing v4 chips.
The AI studio is meant for individuals and small teams. The preview of Gemini Pro can be used in AI Studio with a free quota of 60 requests per minute, which Google emphasized is 20 times as many as other free programming tools.
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A demo was shown of building a real estate broker application in AI Studio using mostly natural-language prompting, with the ability to insert pictures of a house's interior and have the program generate text descriptions of the features of the photos.
Vertex AI, in contrast to AI Studio, has hooks into numerous corporate data sources, including from third-party Google Cloud partners, so its emphasis is on the use of an enterprise's own data.
Kurian emphasized work being done to reassure enterprises that Gemini will avoid the highly-publicized "hallucinations" that have created concern about their use.
ZDNET asked Google Cloud, "In your early work with enterprises, how long does it take to get sufficient output from Gemini Pro to satisfy a company's concerns that the output is likely to be accurate, consistent, and safe?"
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Google Cloud declined to "speculate on this forward-looking question" given that access to Gemini Pro "at scale" is only beginning with the AI Studio and Vertex AI availability now.
The announcements come as Google Cloud this week is hosting a free Applied AI summit for developers.
You can sign up for Vertex AI as a free trial when you sign up to Google Cloud as a free trial. Using Gemini Pro in preview mode in Vertex AI has the same free allotment of 60 requests per minute.
Google Cloud said that both AI Studio and Vertex AI will transition to formal pricing of a fraction of a cent per 1,000 characters when Google Pro becomes generally available "early next year."
The company reduced its Google Cloud pricing by four times for input and two times on output, said Kurian.
Google cloud Gemini pricing.
The Pro version of Gemini is one of three versions, the other two being Ultra and Nano. Ultra is currently in private preview with select customers to get feedback, noted Kurian, while Nano is going to be released on mobile devices. It is already running on Google's Pixel 8 smartphone.
Google Cloud also announced a new version of its text-to-image neural network, Imagen 2, which it says has greater capabilities for things such as text rendering, for inserting corporate brands into images (your company logo on a toothpaste tube in a picture of a bathroom.)
Imagen2 is available in the Vertex AI feature called Model Garden which includes a collection of different neural network programs.
The Model Garden includes multiple third-party neural networks for the first time, including Mistral, ImageBind, and DITO.