Google Ironwood TPU, A2A Protocol And Firebase Studio For App Development & The Creepy Clone Robot!

AI News - April 9

Google makes several major announcements from its Cloud Next conference. They unveil Ironwood, their seventh generation TPU. They introduce a new protocol for AI agent communication, and they announce Firebase Studio for application development. And in robotics, Clone continues to creep everyone out here's today's AI news.

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There were some major announcements from Google at the Cloud Next conference, kicking off with the launch of their seventh generation Tensor Processing unit, or TPU, named Ironwood. Built for intense AI workloads, Ironwood is the successor to Trillion and beats it on every benchmark.

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Ironwood has a performance per watt output that is twice that of trillion. It has 192 gigabytes of memory per chip. That's a 6x increase and it has data access speeds that are four and a half times faster than its predecessor. In a world where AI is growing exponentially, we need hardware that can keep pace and this TPU seems to have taken its own exponential leap.

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Google also introduced the Agent to agent or A2A protocol, an open source framework aimed at enhancing AI agent communication across various platforms. This feels like a rival to MCP, but unlike the Model Context protocol, which focuses on tool and data access, A2A specifically targets Agent to agent interactions.

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So it's a different approach to address the same kind of problem at launch. It's already supported by over 50 technology partners including Salesforce and MongoDB, and there will certainly be many more to come. This is a very interesting development from Google. Perhaps the announcement that has received most attention was Firebase Studio, a new cloud based development environment that uses AI to help develop full stack applications.

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This platform integrates features from multiple existing tools, allowing developers to prototype, build and deploy applications using natural language prompts. Firebase Studio offers real time previews, AI assisted coding and integration with Firebase services. It promises a lot, and this could be a game changing platform if Google manages to get it right.

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And finally, there was an update from robotics company Clone that showed off its progress with its humanoid robot called Protoclone that they justifiably claim to be the most anatomically accurate Android in the world. This thing can't walk yet, but even with its lack of mobility, it wins the prize for being the robot that is most likely to give you nightmares.

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Maybe it's best if it stays immobile for as long as possible.