BENGALURU: Google has been investing in artificial intelligence (AI) for more than 10 years now and at the recently held Google I/O Connect Bengaluru 2024, the tech company unveiled a range of tools and programmes that support developers who build AI solutions. The tech giant said it is focusing on three key AI opportunity areas in India—multimodal, multilingual, and mobile.
Google is expanding access to its AI models Gemini and Gemma, and is also introducing new language tools from Google DeepMind India.
Google’s Gemini is designed to be multimodal, empowering one to reason across text, image, video, code, and more. It said the Google Deepmind India has been focussed on enabling open-source resources to help developers build language solutions for India.
Building high-quality language models that accurately represent the country’s linguistic diversity can be a complex challenge, and Google said it is introducing IndicGenBench, designed specifically for Indian languages. It covers 29 languages, and IndicGenBench provides resource to assess and fine-tune language models.
Gemma is a family of open models built from the same research and technology used to create the Gemini models. Now, Gemma 2, the next generation of open models, has been released. Gemma 2 features improvements in performance and it is available in both 9 billion and 27 billion parameter sizes, optimised by NVIDIA to run on next-gen GPUs (graphics processing units) and also runs on a single TPU (Tensor Processing Units) host in Vertex AI, Google announced.
Gemma’s tokeniser, which breaks down text into smaller units for AI processing, can build multilingual solutions that understand and respond to diverse languages. To enhance on-device AI capabilities, Google also introduced the Matformer framework, pioneered by its Google DeepMind team in India. This will allow developers to mix and match different sized Gemini models within a single framework, optimising for both high performance and low resource consumption.
Ambharish Kenghe, vice-president, Google, said: “AI is a powerful enabler and a major inflection point that will require us to reimagine what’s possible. The opportunities with multimodal, mobile, and multilingual AI are immense.”
New Google Wallet APIs and Google Maps platform
The tech company also announced the launch of Google Wallet APIs (application programming interface) to simplify the integration of loyalty programs, tickets, gift cards. For developers using Google Maps Platform, it also announced India-specific pricing. It is also collaborating with the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), offering developers building for ONDC up to 90% off on select Google Maps Platform APIs.