Google’s AI ecosystem continues to grow as the company expands its partnership with Anthropic, which will now run on Google Cloud’s fastest AI-accelerating chips. This comes on the same day Google rolled out generative AI search capabilities worldwide, powered by PaLM2, putting AI in front of billions of people who use Google search. The two moves show Google is not backing down from a fight with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Google deepened its partnership with Anthropic. The AI company, one of many Google Cloud supports, will run on some of Google’s most advanced chips, the TPU v5e. This adds to the $2 billion already invested in the AI company behind Claude 2, a powerful large language model on the heels of ChatGPT.
“As with all of our investments, we look for opportunities where we can grow the market. We are a large and strategic provider of cloud services for Anthropic, and our partnership is strong,” said a Google spokesperson in an email.
Another move Google made Wednesday involves its search engine. Search Generative Experience (SGE) gives users a quick answer to their search queries in a form that’s similar to other chatbots like ChatGPT. SGE received its largest international expansion ever on Wednesday, launching in more than 120 countries including the United States. The feature will make SGE available to anyone who uses Google search, exposing AI technology to one of the largest platforms on the internet. However, for now, you still have to download Google’s app, Search Labs, to use it.
Google says it is committed to building an AI ecosystem, not just one specific AI product, from early-stage startups to global enterprises, according to a blog post from March.
“To help customers and developers harness this innovation, we’re bringing the best of Google’s infrastructure, AI products, and foundation models to partners at every layer of the AI stack,” said Google in the blog post.
The announcements come from separate pieces of Google’s business, however, all of this takes place on Google Cloud. The chips accelerating Anthropic, the most significant competitor to OpenAI, come from the same cloud provider that will put generative AI in front of billions of users this week.