• Google has announced Gemini Pro is now a part of its Vertex AI tool.
• In addition, businesses can build AI apps for free using Google AI Studio but that may be a privacy nightmare for some.
• As for copyright indemnity, indemnification coverage is planned for the Gemini API when it becomes generally available.

The unabated march of artificial intelligence giants releasing new products and versions of those products continues with Google. Just a few days ago, on the heels of rumours of a delay, Google launched Gemini.

Billed as a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Gemini comes in three flavours namely Nano for smartphones, Pro, for Bard and wider tasks and Ultra for more complex tasks. The latest update from Big G is that Gemini Pro is ready for business use cases.

Gemini Pro is now included in Vertex AI which is a Google tool businesses can use to build AI-powered apps quickly.

With Gemini now backed into the tool, businesses can make use of a curated list of 130 AI models which they can customise to suit their specific needs. These include the newly introduced Medical Pathways Language Model and Security Pathways Language Model.

“Vertex AI Extensions and connectors let developers link Gemini Pro to external APIs for transactions and other actions, retrieve data from outside sources, or call functions in codebases. Vertex AI also gives organizations the ability to ground foundation model outputs in their own data sources, helping to improve the accuracy and relevance of a model’s answers. We offer the ability for enterprises to use grounding against their structured and unstructured data, and grounding with Google Search technology,” Google wrote in a blog.

Apps can also be developed using Google AI Studio. The free edition of this platform allows for 60 requests per minute but there is another caveat you should take note of before diving in.

“When you’re ready, you can simply click on “Get code” to transfer your work to your IDE of choice, or use one of the quickstart templates available in Android Studio, Colab or Project IDX. To help us improve product quality, when you use the free quota, your API and Google AI Studio input and output may be accessible to trained reviewers. This data is de-identified from your Google Account and API key,” Google explains.

There are of course concerns about the use of AI, especially when it comes to potential copyright infringement lawsuits. At the beginning of the year, Getty Images launched a lawsuit against Stability AI on allegations it had trained its image creation model using Getty Images’ library.

Addressing this, Google said it was working to include copyright indemnity with Gemini.

“Google’s comprehensive approach to AI is designed to help keep our customers safe and protected. We employ an industry-first, two-pronged copyright indemnity approach to help give Cloud customers peace of mind when using our generative AI products. Today we are extending our generated output indemnity to now also include model outputs from PaLM 2 and Vertex AI Imagen, in addition to an indemnity on claims related to our use of training data. Indemnification coverage is planned for the Gemini API when it becomes generally available,” Google says.

Essentially, if your business gets into legal trouble concerning copyright infringement as a result of something created while using its AI, Google will assume responsibility for the potential legal risks involved, once Gemini is widely available of course.

This is a big play for Google and we’re curious to see whether it pays off for the firm. While OpenAI are generally regarded as the leaders in the AI space, Google clearly wants a piece of that pie. Making Gemini more easily available to businesses is one way to do that but whether businesses are interested in building AI apps remains to be seen.

There has been a lot of talk about the potential AI has for businesses but we’re yet to hear about how invaluable this technology has become beyond it leading to layoffs and other controversies.