GOOGLE CLOUD NEXT, SAN FRANCISCO – There is a lot (understatement!) of information to take in at Google Cloud Next. So we don’t blame you if you’re looking for just a few snippets to sum up some of the bigger themes of the event.
The good news is that we have a few from Day 1:
Vendors bytes
“As AI evolves, the needs of the hardware, architecture and software stack evolves…and we want to offer customers the broadest, most optimized choice of accelerators. We’re actually offering 30 different types of accelerators in GCP.”
— Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud (NASDAQ:GOOGL) CEO, speaking about its new GPU and TPU announcements during a keynote session. More on those, here.
“Generative AI is revolutionizing every layer of the compute stack. And our two companies ... are joining forces to reinvent cloud infrastructure for generative AI…. This is a reengineering of the entire stack — from the processors to the systems to the networks and all of the software and all of this — to accelerate GCP Vertex AI, and to create software and infrastructure for the world’s AI researchers and developers.”
— Jensen Huang, NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) CEO, speaking about the company’s collaboration with Google Cloud around its H100 chip.
“This person said ‘Generative AI is probably over-hyped in the short term but under-hyped in the long term, and when you really understand what the technology is, it is mind-blowing’…I think statements that you hear, like Sundar and other make that sound like hyperbole, really aren’t. Because they do fundamentally believe that what is happening right now will change everything. And I do…I’ve said we’re living in the midst of an inflection point right now.”
— Anil Jain, Global Managing Director of Strategic Consumer Industries at Google Cloud, speaking to Silverlinings about whether he believes AI is over-hyped.
Keep up with the all the news from Google Cloud Next 2023 with our dedicated news hub here.
Enterprise bits
“The biggest trap I see is that people get caught up in the hype and there’s massive FOMO and you begin to shoot before you’ve aimed…Even though we’re thinking really big, we’re being deliberate about the use cases that we’re deploying and how we deploy those use cases are really anchored on true business value.”
“It’s more important to get this right than to be first.”
— Gibu Thomas, EVP of Online at The Estée Lauder Companies (NYSE:EL), on generative AI for enterprises.
“There’s never enough compute and it’s never at a low enough cost…But I think every constraint is a driver for innovation and that’s exactly what you’re seeing in this case as well.”
“How do you use hardware more efficiently? So not just a large quantity but how do you get the most out of the hardware that you have, how do you utilize less and less hardware for the same use case, how do you utilize what’s already been done and work on top of it? That becomes critical.”
— Saurabh Baji, CTO at Cohere, responding to a question about whether there’s enough compute power available to meet enterprise demand.
“Our business is built on trust. It’s our most important asset and there is no free pass for any technology, whether that be AI or another one.”
— Christoph Rabenseifner, chief strategy officer for technology, data and innovation at Deutsche Bank (ETR: DBK), speaking about prerequisites for capturing the promise of generative AI in a heavily regulated industry.
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