The high-level meeting, dubbed the MS CEO Summit 2024, will be held on 14 May 2024 and feature Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates and Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella. They will engage in closed-door discussions with Kyung Kye-hyun of Samsung, Kwak Noh-jung of SK Hynix, Cho Joo-wan of LG Electronics, and Ryu Young-sang of SK Telecom.

Sources for The Korea Economic Daily suggest that Microsoft plans to explore joint ventures in AI technology across various sectors. Discussions with Samsung and SK Hynix will likely centre on the joint development and supply of AI chips.

Samsung and SK Hynix are recognised as being among the world’s leading memory chipmakers and can enhance Microsoft’s server capabilities with next-generation technologies such as High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) AI chips and solid-state drives (SSDs).

Collaboration topics with LG Electronics will include integrating AI technologies into home appliances, a move that will boost Microsoft’s competitive edge against rivals like Google and Meta. With SK Telecom, Microsoft is expected to delve further into cloud and 5G services.

These meetings are timely, as the global tech landscape sees an increased focus on AI development. By potentially integrating Microsoft’s AI services into products like Samsung’s smartphones and LG’s home appliances, Microsoft could significantly elevate its market standing.

Kyung of Samsung’s Device Solutions indicated last month that their new AI accelerators, Mach-1 and Mach-2, will soon move into mass production. These accelerators are designed to optimise the synergy between GPUs and HBM chips, promising a revolution in processing speeds. Earlier this month, the company unveiled the industry’s first LPDDR5X DRAM which aims to boost on-device AI.

SK Telecom, under CEO Ryu, spearheads the Global Telco AI Alliance (GTAA). This consortium, including major global players like Deutsche Telekom and SingTel, aims to develop AI infrastructure and generative AI services across a customer base exceeding 1.3 billion globally.

Last year, SK Telecom invested $100 million in AI startup Anthropic to develop a large language model (LLM) specifically for telcos. The collaborative endeavour extends to the Telco AI Platform, an ongoing project initiated by the GTAA.

The MS CEO Summit 2024 presents an opportunity for enhanced AI cooperation and technological advancement, securing Microsoft’s position as a pivotal player in the industry.

(Photo by Natalie Pedigo)

See also: Meta raises the bar with open source Llama 3 LLM

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with other leading events including BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.

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Mistral AI stated that Mistral Large outscored most major LLMs except for OpenAI’s recently launched GPT-4 in tests of language understanding. It also performed strongly in maths and coding assessments.

Co-founder and Chief Scientist Guillaume Lample said Mistral Large represents a major advance over earlier Mistral models. The company also launched a chatbot interface named Le Chat to allow users to interact with the system, similar to ChatGPT.  

The proprietary model boasts fluency in English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian, with a vocabulary exceeding 20,000 words. While Mistral’s first model was open-source, Mistral Large’s code remains closed like systems from OpenAI and other firms.  

Mistral AI received nearly $500 million in funding late last year from backers such as Nvidia and Andreessen Horowitz. It also recently partnered with Microsoft to provide access to Mistral Large through Azure cloud services.  

Microsoft’s investment of €15 million into Mistral AI is set to face scrutiny from European Union regulators who are already analysing the tech giant’s ties to OpenAI, maker of market-leading models like GPT-3 and GPT-4. The European Commission said Tuesday it will review Microsoft’s deal with Mistral, which could lead to a formal probe jeopardising the partnership.

Microsoft has focused most of its AI efforts on OpenAI, having invested around $13 billion into the California company. Those links are now also under review in both the EU and UK for potential anti-competitive concerns. 

Pricing for the Mistral Large model starts at $8 per million tokens of input and $24 per million output tokens. The system will leverage Azure’s computing infrastructure for training and deployment needs as Mistral AI and Microsoft partner on AI research as well.

While third-party rankings have yet to fully assess Mistral Large, the firm’s earlier Mistral Medium ranked 6th out of over 60 language models. With the latest release, Mistral AI appears positioned to challenge dominant players in the increasingly crowded AI space.

(Photo by Joshua Golde on Unsplash)

See also: Stability AI previews Stable Diffusion 3 text-to-image model

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with other leading events including BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.

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The tech giant is set to unveil new data centres in Madrid and has outlined its intention to construct additional centres in Aragon, catering to European companies and public entities. The increased European infrastructure aims to deliver Microsoft’s cloud services with heightened security, privacy, and data sovereignty measures, facilitating access to the company’s full suite of AI solutions for businesses and public administrations in the region.

According to an analysis by IDC, these new Microsoft data centres have the potential to contribute €8.4 billion to the national GDP and help to generate 69,000 jobs from 2026 to 2030.

The commitment to investment aligns with a collaborative agreement forged between the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and Microsoft President Brad Smith. Under this collaboration, Microsoft and the Government of Spain will collaborate on various initiatives aimed at advancing responsible AI, enhancing citizen services, and bolstering national cybersecurity and resilience across Spanish companies, public bodies, and critical infrastructures.

This partnership operates within the framework of the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence and the National Cybersecurity Strategy outlined by the Spanish government. It revolves around four key action points:

1. Extension of AI in public administration: Efforts will be directed towards modernising administrative processes and equipping officials with AI tools to boost efficiency. This includes deploying generative AI solutions and implementing AI training plans for officials.

2. Promotion of responsible AI: Microsoft will share its responsible AI design standards, along with implementation guides and best practices documentation, with the Spanish Agency for the Supervision of Artificial Intelligence (AESIA).

3. Strengthening national cybersecurity: Collaboration with the National Cryptological Center (CNI) aims to enhance early warning mechanisms and response to cybersecurity incidents in public administrations.

4. Improving cyber-resilience of companies: Microsoft will collaborate with the National Institute of Cybersecurity (INCIBE) to enhance the cybersecurity posture of Spanish companies, particularly SMEs, by providing access to threat intelligence and conducting joint outreach initiatives.

Microsoft’s increased investment underscores its commitment to advancing technological innovation in Spain while fostering a secure and responsible digital ecosystem.

(Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash)

See also: Wipro and IBM collaborate to propel enterprise AI

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with other leading events including BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.

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The 33-acre site in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire will bring much-needed compute capacity to businesses, supporting AI innovation and ensuring reliable digital services for Google Cloud customers and general consumers relying on products like Search, Maps, and YouTube.

Ruth Porat, Alphabet’s president and chief financial officer, said the data centre “represents our latest investment in the UK and the wider digital economy.” She added that it builds on previous investments like Saint Giles and Kings Cross offices, a multi-year research deal with Cambridge, and the Grace Hopper subsea cable connecting the UK with the US and Spain.

Porat said the facility will “help meet growing demand for our AI and cloud services and bring crucial compute capacity to businesses across the UK while creating construction and technical jobs for the local community.”

As a pioneer in computing infrastructure, Google runs some of the most efficient data centres in the world and has committed to powering them entirely on carbon-free energy around the clock by 2030.

Last year, Google signed a deal with ENGIE for offshore wind energy from Scotland’s Moray West farm which will provide 100MW of energy and put UK operations on track for 90 percent clean energy by 2025.

The new data centre will recover heat for local homes and businesses while also deploying an air-cooling system.

Porat called the new data centre the “latest in a series of investments that support Brits and the wider economy” and evidence of its “continued commitment to the UK.” Other investments include $1 billion for its Central Saint Giles office space, developing the one million sq ft King’s Cross campus, and an Accessibility Discovery Centre spurring accessible technology.

Beyond offices, data centres, and subsea cables, Google has also provided digital skills training for over a million Brits and expanded its AI-focussed Digital Garage curriculum to capitalise on demand for the technology.  

Google’s announcement follows Microsoft confirming a £2.5 billion data centre in the UK last November after overcoming regulatory hurdles for its £55 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition.

“This is the single largest investment in its 40-year history in the country which will see Microsoft grow its UK AI infrastructure across sites in London and Cardiff and potential expansion into northern England, helping to meet the exploding demand for efficient, scalable, and sustainable AI specific compute power,” explained HM Treasury.

“Data centres process, host, and store the massive amounts of digital information that is critical for developing AI models.”

Microsoft is supplying its UK data centre with more than 20,000 advanced GPUs for machine learning and the development of new AI models.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt said: “The UK is the tech hub of Europe with an ecosystem worth more than that of Germany and France combined – and this investment is another vote of confidence in us as a science superpower.”

(Image Credit: Google)

See also: DeepMind AlphaGeometry solves complex geometry problems

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Leveraging the power of NVIDIA’s AI foundry service on Microsoft Azure, Amdocs aims to meet the escalating demand for data processing and analysis in the telecoms sector.

The telecoms industry processes hundreds of petabytes of data daily. With the anticipation of global data transactions surpassing 180 zettabytes by 2025, telcos are turning to generative AI to enhance efficiency and productivity.

NVIDIA’s AI foundry service – comprising the NVIDIA AI Foundation Models, NeMo framework, and DGX Cloud AI supercomputing – provides an end-to-end solution for creating and optimising custom generative AI models.

Amdocs will utilise the AI foundry service to develop enterprise-grade LLMs tailored for the telco and media industries, facilitating the deployment of generative AI use cases across various business domains.

This collaboration builds on the existing Amdocs-Microsoft partnership, ensuring the adoption of applications in secure, trusted environments, both on-premises and in the cloud.

Enterprises are increasingly focusing on developing custom models to perform industry-specific tasks. Amdocs serves over 350 of the world’s leading telecom and media companies across 90 countries. This partnership with NVIDIA opens avenues for exploring generative AI use cases, with initial applications focusing on customer care and network operations.

In customer care, the collaboration aims to accelerate the resolution of inquiries by leveraging information from across company data. In network operations, the companies are exploring solutions to address configuration, coverage, or performance issues in real-time.

This move by Amdocs positions the company at the forefront of ushering in a new era for the telecoms industry by harnessing the capabilities of custom generative AI models.

(Photo by Danist Soh on Unsplash)

See also: Wolfram Research: Injecting reliability into generative AI

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with Digital Transformation Week.

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According to Barnett, Cloudflare’s cloud-native approach allows the company to continually innovate in the digital space. Notably, a significant portion of their services are offered to consumers for free.

“We continuously reinvent, we’re very comfortable in the digital space. We’re very proud that the vast majority of our customers actually consume our services for free because it’s our way of giving back to society,” said Barnett.

Barnett also revealed Cloudflare’s focus on AI during their anniversary week. The company aims to enable organisations to consume AI securely and make it accessible to everyone. Barnett says that Cloudflare achieves those goals in three key ways.

“One, as I mentioned, is operating AI inference engines within Cloudflare close to consumers’ eyeballs. The second area is securing the use of AI within the workplace, because, you know, AI has some incredibly positive impacts on people … but the problem is there are some data protection requirements around that,” explains Barnett.

“Finally, is the question of, ‘Could AI be used by the bad guys against the good guys?’ and that’s an area that we’re continuing to explore.”

Just a day earlier, AI News heard from Raviv Raz, Cloud Security Manager at ING, during a session at the expo that focused on the alarming potential of AI-powered cybercrime.

Regarding security models, Barnett discussed the evolution of the zero-trust concept, emphasising its practical applications in enhancing both usability and security. Cloudflare’s own journey with zero-trust began with a focus on usability, leading to the development of its own zero-trust network access products.

“We have servers everywhere and engineers everywhere that need to reboot those servers. In 2015, that involved VPNs and two-factor authentication… so we built our own zero-trust network access product for our own use that meant the user experiences for engineers rebooting servers in far-flung places was a lot better,” says Barnett.

“After 2015, the world started to realise that this approach had great security benefits so we developed that product and launched it in 2018 as Cloudflare Access.”

Cloudflare’s innovative strides also include leveraging NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate machine learning AI tasks on an edge network. This technology enables organisations to run inference tasks – such as image recognition – close to end-users, ensuring low latency and optimal performance.

“We launched Workers AI, which means that organisations around the world – in fact, individuals as well – can run their inference tasks at a very close place to where the consumers of that inference are,” explains Barnett.

“You could ask a question, ‘Cat or not cat?’, to a trained cat detection engine very close to the people that need it. We’re doing that in a way that makes it easily accessible to organisations looking to use AI to benefit their business.”

For developers interested in AI, Barnett outlined Cloudflare’s role in supporting the deployment of machine learning models. While machine learning training is typically conducted outside Cloudflare, the company excels in providing low-latency inference engines that are essential for real-time applications like image recognition.

Our conversation with Barnett shed light on Cloudflare’s commitment to cloud-native architecture, AI accessibility, and cybersecurity. As the industry continues to advance, Cloudflare remains at the forefront of delivering speed and security in the AI era.

You can watch our full interview with Dave Barnett below:

(Photo by ryan baker on Unsplash)

See also: JPMorgan CEO: AI will be used for ‘every single process’

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with Cyber Security & Cloud Expo, Edge Computing Expo, and Digital Transformation Week.

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Currently, Azure OpenAI Service provides access to some of the most powerful AI models in the world—including Codex and DALL-E 2.

A “fine-tuned” version of GPT-3.5 will also be available through Azure OpenAI Service soon.

Azure OpenAI Service was unveiled in November 2021. However, until now the service was not generally available.

In the months since its unveiling, Microsoft and OpenAI have demonstrated more of the models’ capabilities.

In June 2021, Microsoft-owned GitHub launched ‘Copilot’—a controversial AI programmer that can help developers write and improve their code.

Copilot has continued to see regular enhancements. Just this week, GitHub Next unveiled a project called Code Brushes which uses machine learning to update code “like painting with Photoshop”.

In October 2022, Microsoft announced that the impressive text-to-image generative AI model DALL-E 2 would be integrated with the new Designer app and Bing Image Creator.

DALL-E 2, alongside others like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, also stirred controversy and spurred protests from artists.

Beyond integrating DALL-E 2 in the Bing Image Creator, Microsoft is rumoured to be preparing to use ChatGPT to enhance Bing’s search capability and challenge Google’s dominance.

While the AI models have caused their fair share of concerns and raised important questions around everything from copyright to the wider societal impact, Microsoft and OpenAI have shown how powerful the models are.

Azure OpenAI Service has the potential to enhance our content production in several ways, including summarization and translation, selection of topics, AI tagging, content extraction, and style guide rule application,” said Jason McCartney, Vice President of Engineering at Al Jazeera.

“We are excited to see this service go to general availability so it can help us further contextualize our reporting by conveying the opinion and the other opinion.”

By making Azure OpenAI Service generally available, the duo are enabling more businesses to join others in accessing tools which can improve their operations.

“At Moveworks, we see Azure OpenAI Service as an important component of our machine learning architecture. It enables us to solve several novel use cases, such as identifying gaps in our customer’s internal knowledge bases and automatically drafting new knowledge articles based on those gaps,” commented Vaibhav Nivargi, CTO and Founder at Moveworks.

“Given that so much of the modern enterprise relies on language to get work done, the possibilities are endless—and we look forward to continued collaboration and partnership with Azure OpenAI Service.”

You can find out more about Azure OpenAI Service here.

(Image Credit: Microsoft)

Related: OpenAI opens waitlist for paid version of ChatGPT

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The event is co-located with Digital Transformation Week.

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London-based Babylon Health is a digital-first health service provider that uses AI and machine learning technology to provide access to health information to people whenever and wherever they need it.

The company has partnered with private and public across the UK, North America, South-East Asia, and Rwanda with the aim of making healthcare more accessible and affordable to 24 million patients worldwide.

“Our job is to help people to stay well and we’re on a mission to provide affordable, accessible health care to everyone in the world,” explains Richard Noble, Engineering Director of Data at Babylon.

Babylon Health’s rapid growth has led it to seek a partner to help it scale.

By partnering with Google Cloud, the company claims that it’s been able to:

• Increase event data ingestion from 1 TB per week to 190 TB daily
• Reduce the wait time for users to access data from six months to a week
• Integrate over 100 data sources – providing access to 80 billion data points
• Save hundreds of hours of work by automatically transcribing 100,000 video consultations in 2021

Babylon Health needs to store and process huge amounts of sensitive data.

“We work with a lot of private patient data and we must ensure that it stays private,” explains Natalie Godec, cloud engineer at Babylon. “At the same time, we must enable our teams to innovate with that data while meeting different national regulatory standards.”

Therefore, Babylon Health required a partner it felt could handle such demands.

“We chose Google Cloud because we knew it could scale with us and support us with our data science and analysis and we could build the tools we needed with it quickly,” added Noble. “It offers the solutions that enable us to focus on our core business, access to health.”

Babylon Health says the move to Google Cloud has enabled it to better analyse its data using AI to unlock new tools and features that help clinicians and users alike. While building a new data model and giving access to users initially took six months, the company says it now takes under a week.

In London, Babylon Health offers its ‘GP at Hand’ service which – in partnership with the NHS – acts as a digital GP practice. Patients can connect to NHS clinicians remotely 24/7 and even be issued prescriptions if required. Where physical examinations are needed, patients will be directed to a suitable venue.

However, GP at Hand has been criticised as “cherry-picking” healthier patients—taking resources away from local GP practices that are often trying to care for sicker, more elderly patients.

Growing pains

While initial problems are to be expected from any relatively new service; poor advice in a healthcare service could result in unnecessary suffering, long-term complications, or even death.

In 2018, Dr David Watkins – a consultant oncologist at Royal Marsden Hospital – reached out to AI News to alert us to Babylon Health’s chatbot giving unsafe advice.

Dr Watkins provided numerous examples of clearly dangerous advice being given by the chatbot:

Babylon Health called Dr Watkins a “troll” who has “targeted members of our staff, partners, clients, regulators and journalists and tweeted defamatory content about us”.

According to Babylon Health, Dr Watkins conducted 2,400 tests of the chatbot in a bid to discredit the service while raising “fewer than 100 test results which he considered concerning”.

Babylon Health claims that in just 20 cases did Dr Watkins find genuine errors while others were “misrepresentations” or “mistakes,” according to Babylon’s own “panel of senior clinicians” who remain unnamed.

Dr Watkins called Babylon’s claims “utterly nonsense” and questions where the startup got its figures from as “there are certainly not 2,400 completed triage assessments”. He estimates conducting between 800 and 900 full triages and that some were repeat tests to see whether Babylon Health had fixed the issues he previously highlighted.

That same year, Babylon Health published a paper claiming that its AI could diagnose common diseases as well as human physicians. The Royal College of General Practitioners, the British Medical Association, Fraser and Wong, and the Royal College of Physicians all issued statements disputing the paper’s claims.

Dr Watkins has acknowledged that Babylon Health’s chatbot has improved and has substantially reduced its error rate. In 2018, when Dr Watkins first reached out to us, he says this rate was “one in one”.

In 2020, Babylon Health claimed in a paper that it can now appropriately triage patients in 85 percent of cases.

Hopefully, the partnership with Google Cloud continues to improve Babylon Health’s abilities to help it achieve its potentially groundbreaking aim to deliver 24/7 access to healthcare wherever a patient is.

(Photo by Hush Naidoo Jade Photography on Unsplash)

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo. The next events in the series will be held in Santa Clara on 11-12 May 2022, Amsterdam on 20-21 September 2022, and London on 1-2 December 2022.

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“From cloud to edge, Paravision’s goal is to help our partners develop and deploy transformative solutions around face recognition and computer vision,” said Joey Pritikin, Chief Product Officer at Paravision.

“With these sweeping updates to our product family, and with what has become possible in terms of accuracy, speed, usability and portability, we see a remarkable opportunity to unite disparate applications with a coherent sense of identity that bridges physical spaces and cyberspace.”

A new Scaled Vector Search (SVS) capability acts as a search engine to provide accurate, rapid, and stable face matching on large databases that may contain tens of millions of identities. Paravision claims the SVS engine supports hundreds of transactions per second with extremely low latencies.

Another scaling solution called Streaming Container 5 enables the processing of video at over 250 frames per second from any number of streams. The solution features advanced face tracking to ensure that identities remain accurate even in busy environments.

With more enterprises than ever looking to the latency-busting and privacy-enhancing benefits of edge computing, Paravision has partnered with Teknique to co-create a series of hardware and software reference designs that enable the rapid development of face recognition and computer vision capabilities at the edge.

Teknique is a leader in the development of hardware based on designs from California-based fabless semiconductor company Ambarella.

Paravision’s Face SDK has been enhanced for smart cameras powered by Ambarella CVflow chipsets. The update enables facial recognition on CVflow-powered cameras to achieve up to 40 frames per second full pipeline performance.

A new Liveness and Anti-spoofing SDK also adds new safeguards for Ambarella-powered facial recognition solutions. The toolkit uses Ambarella’s visible light, near-infrared, and depth-sensing capabilities to determine whether the camera is seeing a live subject or whether it’s being tricked by recorded footage or a dummy image.

On the mobile side, Paravision has released its Face SDK for Android. The SDK includes face detection, landmarks, quality assessment, template creation, and 1-to-1 or 1-to-many matching. Reference applications are included which include UI/UX recommendations and tools.

Last but certainly not least, Paravision has announced the availability of its first person-level computer vision SDK. The new SDK is designed to go “beyond face recognition” to detect the presence and position of individuals and unlock new use cases.

Provided examples of real-world applications for the computer vision SDK include occupancy analysis, the ability to spot tailgating, as well as custom intention or subject attributes.

“With Person Detection, users could determine whether employees are allowed access to a specific area, are wearing a mask or hard hat, or appear to be in distress,” the company explains. “It can also enable useful business insights such as metrics about queue times, customer throughput or to detect traveller bottlenecks.”

With these exhaustive updates, Paravision is securing its place as one of the most exciting companies in the AI space.

Paravision is ranked the US leader across several of NIST’s Face Recognition Vendor Test evaluations including 1:1 verification, 1:N identification, performance for paperless travel, and performance with face masks.

(Photo by Daniil Kuželev on Unsplash)

Find out more about Digital Transformation Week North America, taking place on 9-10 November 2021, a virtual event and conference exploring advanced DTX strategies for a ‘digital everything’ world.

The post Paravision boosts its computer vision and facial recognition capabilities appeared first on AI News.

Vertex was announced during this year’s virtual I/O developer conference and somewhat breaks from Google’s tradition of using its keynote to focus more on updates to its mobile and web development solutions. Google announcing the platform during the keynote shows how important the company believes it to be for a wide range of developers.

Google claims that using Vertex enables models to be trained with up to 80 percent fewer lines of code when compared to competing platforms.

Bradley Shimmin, Chief Analyst for AI Platforms, Analytics, and Data Management at Omdia, said:

“Data science practitioners hoping to put AI to work across the enterprise aren’t looking to wrangle tooling. Rather, they want tooling that can tame the ML lifecycle. Unfortunately, that is no small order.

It takes a supportive infrastructure capable of unifying the user experience, plying AI itself as a supportive guide, and putting data at the very heart of the process — all while encouraging the flexible adoption of diverse technologies.”

Vertex brings together Google Cloud’s AI solutions into a single environment where models can go from experimentation all the way to production.

Andrew Moore, VP and GM of Cloud AI and Industry Solutions at Google Cloud, said:

“We had two guiding lights while building Vertex AI: get data scientists and engineers out of the orchestration weeds, and create an industry-wide shift that would make everyone get serious about moving AI out of pilot purgatory and into full-scale production.

We are very proud of what we came up with in this platform, as it enables serious deployments for a new generation of AI that will empower data scientists and engineers to do fulfilling and creative work.”

Vertex provides access to Google’s MLOps toolkit which the company uses internally for workloads involving computer vision, conversation, and language.

Other MLOps features supported by Vertex include Vizier, which increases the rate of experimentation; Feature Store to help practitioners serve, share, and reuse ML features; and Experiments to accelerate the deployment of models into production with faster model selection.

Some high-profile companies were given early access to Vertex. Among them is ModiFace, a part of L’Oréal that focuses on the use of AR and AI to revolutionise the beauty industry.

Jeff Houghton, COO at ModiFace, said:

“We provide an immersive and personalized experience for people to purchase with confidence whether it’s a virtual try-on at web check out, or helping to understand what brand product is right for each individual.

With more and more of our users looking for information at home, on their phone, or at any other touchpoint, Vertex AI allowed us to create technology that is incredibly close to actually trying the product in real life.”

ModiFace uses Vertex to train AI models for all of its new services. For example, the company’s skin diagnostic service is trained on thousands of images from L’Oréal’s Research & Innovation arm and is combined with ModiFace’s AI algorithm to create tailor-made skincare routines.

Another firm that is benefiting from Vertex’s capabilities is Essence, a media agency that is part of London-based global advertising and communications giant WPP.

With Vertex AI, Essence’s developers and data analysts are able to regularly update models to keep pace with the rapidly-changing world of human behaviours and channel content.

Those are just two examples of companies whose operations are already being greatly enhanced through the use of Vertex. Now the floodgates have been opened, we’re sure there’ll be many more stories over the coming years and we can’t wait to hear about them.

You can learn how to get started with Vertex AI here.

(Photo by John Baker on Unsplash)

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this? Attend the co-located 5G Expo, IoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo, AI & Big Data Expo, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London, and Amsterdam.

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