Google is going beyond building artificial intelligence (AI) chips for its data centres.
At the Google Cloud Next ’18 conference in San Francisco, the Internet giant announced two new products aimed at helping customers develop and deploy intelligent connected devices at scale. The first one was ‘Edge TPU,’ a new hardware chip, so small that four of them can fit on a U.S penny, Injong Rhee, VP, IoT, Google Cloud, demonstrated on the stage.
‘Brain to devices’
“Edge TPU would bring the brain to your devices... at extremely low cost and high power efficiency without compromising performance,” said Mr. Rhee.“I believe this is a game changer.”
Edge TPU is Google’s purpose-built application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designed to run AI at the edge.
It delivers high performance in a small physical and power footprint, enabling the deployment of high-accuracy AI at the edge, according to the company.
The other product announced was ‘Cloud IoT Edge,’ a software stack that extends Google Cloud’s powerful AI capability to gateways and connected devices.
One of the companies using these new technologies is LG CNS, a subsidiary of LG. Shingyoon Hyun, the CTO of LG CNS, said with intelligent vision inspection, the company is eager to make a better working place, raise the quality of the product and save millions of dollars each year.
“Google Cloud AI and IoT technologies with LG CNS expertise make this possible,” said Mr. Hyun.
In May this year, Google’s rival Microsoft announced the preview introduction of its Project Brainwave, a system which has specialised chips to run AI models, on its cloud computing platform Azure.
Mr. Rhee of Google said ‘‘Cloud IoT Edge, Edge TPU and Cloud IoT Core’ are opening up completely new possibilities with the Internet of Things (IoT) — a technology where devices communicate with each other intelligently.
He said with powerful data processing and machine learning capabilities at the edge, devices such as robotic arms, wind turbines and smart cars can now act on the data from their sensors in real time and predict outcomes locally.
Also, automotive companies can increase safety through intelligent technologies like collision avoidance, traffic routing, and eyes-off-the-road detection systems, said Mr.Rhee. Research firm IDC estimates that the total amount of data generated from connected devices will exceed 40 trillion gigabytes by 2025.
Google also announced that it is making the new Gmail generally available to the customers of G Suite, the company ’s package of workplace productivity tools. It said more companies can take advantage of features like redesigned security warnings, snooze and offline access.
Mountain View, California-based Google said that it is using machine learning to analyse threat indicators across billions of messages in Gmail to help quickly identify potential security attacks in the making. ML helps protect more than 1.4 billion active Gmail user accounts “from nearly 10 million spam and malicious emails every minute,” said Garrick Toubassi, vice president of engineering, G Suite.
Google also announced a new Cloud Search functionality to help companies intelligently and securely index their third-party data beyond G Suite, whether that data is stored in the cloud, or on-premise.
Companies, like Whirlpool Corporation, have started deploying Cloud Search’s new capabilities to unify search across multiple data sources. It has created a custom app that indexes more than 12 million documents across different on-premise and cloud systems and returns results in “100s of milliseconds on average,” said Mr. Toubassi.
Titan Security Key
Google also announced a product called ‘Titan Security Key’ to protect its customers from phishing attacks. Jennifer Lin, product management director, Google Cloud said the company has long advocated the use of security keys as the strongest, most phishing-resistant authentication factor for high-value users, especially cloud admins, to protect against the potentially damaging consequences of credential theft. Titan Security Keys are available now to Google Cloud customers and will be available for anyone to purchase on the Google Store soon.
(The writer is in San Francisco at the invitation of Google)
