GCP – Generative AI support on Vertex AI is now generally available

At Google Cloud, we’re committed to making generative AI useful for everyone. Doing so requires more than making powerful foundation models available to businesses, governments, and developers. Models also need to be backed by platforms that make adoption faster and safer, with onramps to meet organizations wherever they are, regardless of their software or data science expertise. 

Today, we’re excited to announce general availability of Generative AI support on Vertex AI, giving customers access to our latest platform capabilities for building and powering custom generative AI applications. With this update, developers can access our text model powered by PaLM 2, Embeddings API for text, and other foundation models in Model Garden, as well as leverage user-friendly tools in Generative AI Studio for model tuning and deployment. Backed by enterprise-grade data governance, security, and safety features, Vertex AI can make it easier than ever for customers to access foundation models, customize them with their own data, and quickly build generative AI applications.

Vertex AI powers generative AI model customization for enterprise developers, data scientists, and everyone in between 

Foundation models are the starting point for creating customized generative AI applications—but models alone are not sufficient. That’s why in March, we announced Generative AI support on Vertex AI, the biggest-ever update to our machine learning platform, and began working with trusted testers. Now generally available to customers, Model Garden and Generative AI Studio leverage Google Cloud’s tight partnership with Google Research and Google DeepMind, making it easy for developers and data scientists to use, customize, and deploy models. 

Model Garden lets customers access and experiment with foundation models from Google and its partners, with over 60 models available and many more to come. In addition to making Model Garden, PaLM 2, and Embeddings API for text generally available, we’re also making our recently-announced Codey model for code completion, generation, and chat available for public preview. 

Along with these and other foundation models, Vertex AI offers a full ecosystem of tools to help builders tune, deploy, and govern models in production. For example, in May, we were the first enterprise ML platform to provide Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback, or RLHF, which helps improve model usefulness and reduce cost. We’ve also upgraded Vertex AI’s suite of MLOps tools for model development and maintenance for customers who need to manage large models. With Generative AI Studio generally available, customers can now leverage an even wider range of tools, including multiple tuning methods for large models, that can significantly accelerate development of custom generative AI applications. 

We’re already seeing innovative results from early adopters via our trusted tester program and preview period. For example, leading global airline supplier GA Telesis is using our PaLM model on Vertex AI to build a data extraction solution that automatically synthesizes email orders and provides customers a quote. This eliminates the need for their sales teams to manually cross-reference emails with inventory availability. GitLab is leveraging our Codey model on Vertex AI for their “Explain this Vulnerability” feature, which gives their users a natural language description of code vulnerabilities, along with recommendations for resolving them. Canva, the visual communication platform, is using Google Cloud’s rich generative AI capabilities in language translation to better support its non-English speaking users, letting users easily translate presentations, posters, social media posts, and more into over a hundred languages. The company is also testing ways that Google’s PaLM technology can turn short video clips into longer, more compelling stories. 

And today, we’re pleased to share that Typeface, and DataStax are also building new generative AI capabilities with Vertex AI.    

Now is the time to build 

These announcements add to our news yesterday that we’ve added expanded access to Enterprise Search on Generative AI App Builder (Gen App Builder), allowing businesses to create custom chatbots and search engines that combine generative AI with Google’s semantic search technologies. Gen App Builder offers out-of-box solutions to common generative AI use cases, Vertex AI’s expansive platform capabilities can accelerate wide-ranging innovation, and growing ecosystem support from partners help our customers build freely. Together, these technologies and partnerships mean the full spectrum of developers and data scientists, from novices to seasoned experts, can build generative AI apps with enterprise-ready services on Google Cloud. 

As with our entire Cloud portfolio, Vertex AI and Gen App Builder help give customers complete control over their data; it doesn’t need to leave the customer’s tenant, is encrypted both in transit and at rest, and is not shared or used to train Google models. Google rigorously evaluates our new models to ensure they meet our Responsible AI Principles, and all of our generative AI offerings include the user security, data management, and access controls Google Cloud customers have come to expect. 

We’re grateful to our trusted testers for their integral role in bringing Generative AI support on Vertex AI to market, and we look forward to seeing what customers across all industries create with our growing catalog. To learn more about Google Cloud’s generative AI products, visit our solutions page, and to keep up with our latest AI news, don’t miss “The Prompt” or our generative AI primer for executives on Transform with Google Cloud.