GCP – News you can use: What we announced in AI this month

2025 is off to a racing start. From announcing strides in the new Gemini 2.0 model family to retailers accelerating with Cloud AI, we spent January investing in our partner ecosystem, open-source, and ways to make AI more useful. We’ve heard from people everywhere, from developers to CMOs, about the pressure to adapt the latest in AI with efficiency and speed – and the delicate balance of being both conservative and forward-thinking. We’re here to help. Each month, we’ll post a retrospective that recaps Google Cloud’s latest announcements in AI – and importantly, how to make the most of these innovations. 

Top announcements: Bringing AI to you 

This month, we announced agent evaluation in Vertex AI. A surprise to nobody, AI agents are top of mind for many industries looking to deploy their AI and boost productivity. But closing the gap between impressive model demos and real-world performance is crucial for successfully deploying generative AI. That’s why we announced Vertex AI’s RAG Engine, a fully managed service that helps you build and deploy RAG implementations with your data and methods. Together, these new innovations can help you build reliable, trustworthy models.

From an infrastructure perspective, we announced new updates to AI Hypercomputer. We wanted to make it easier for you to run large multi-node workloads on GPUs by launching A3 Ultra VMs and Hypercompute Cluster, our new highly scalable clustering system. This builds on multiple advancements in AI infrastructure, including Trillium, our sixth-generation TPU.

What’s new in partners and open-source 

This month, we invested in our relationship with our partners. We shared how Gemini-powered content creation in Partner Marketing Studio will help partners co-market faster. These features are designed to streamline marketing efforts across our entire ecosystem, empowering our partners to unlock new levels of success, efficiency, and impact. 

At the same time, we shared several important announcements in the world of open-source. We announced Mistral AI’s Mistral Large 24.11 and Codestral 25.01 models on Vertex AI. These models will help developers write code and build faster – from high-complexity tasks to reasoning tasks, like creative writing. To help you get started, we provided sample code and documentation.

And, most recently, we announced the public beta of Gen AI Toolbox for Databases in partnership with LangChain, the leading orchestration framework for developers building LLM applications. Toolbox is an open-source server that empowers application developers to connect production-grade, agent-based generative AI applications to databases. You can get started here.

Industry news: Google Cloud at the National Retail Federation (NRF) 

The National Retail Federation kicked off the year with their annual NRF conference, where Google Cloud showed how AI agents and AI-powered search are already helping retailers operate more efficiently, create personalized shopping experiences, and use AI to get the latest products and experiences to their customers. Check our new AI tools to help retailers build gen AI search and agents. 

As an example, Google Cloud worked with NVIDIA to empower retailers to boost their customer engagements in exciting new ways, deliver more hyper-personalized recommendations, and build their own AI applications and agents. Now with NVIDIA’s AI Enterprise software available on Google Cloud, retailers can handle more data and more complex AI tasks without their systems getting bogged down.

News you can use 

This month, we shared several ways to better implement fast-moving AI, from a comprehensive guide on Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), to how developers can help their LLMs deliver more accurate, relevant, and contextually aware responses, minimizing hallucinations and building trust in AI applications by optimizing their RAG retrieval.

We also published new documentation to use open models in Vertex AI Studio. Model selection isn’t limited to Google’s Gemini anymore. Now, choose models from Anthropic, Meta, and more when writing or comparing prompts.

Hear from our leaders

We closed out the month with The Prompt, our monthly column that brings observations from the field of AI. This month, we heard from Warren Barkley, AI product leader, who shares some best practices and essential guidance to help organizations successfully move AI pilots to production. Here’s a snippet:

More than 60% of enterprises are now actively using gen AI in production, helping to boost productivity and business growth, bolster security, and improve user experiences. In the last year alone, we witnessed a staggering 36x increase in Gemini API usage and a nearly 5x increase of Imagen API usage on Vertex AI — clear evidence that our customers are making the move towards bringing gen AI to their real-world applications.

Stay tuned for monthly updates on Google Cloud’s AI announcements, news, and best practices. For a deeper dive into the latest from Google Cloud, read our weekly updates, The Overwhelmed Person’s Guide to Google Cloud.