Vertex AI

Vertex AI is Google Cloud's managed AI platform, announced and made generally available on May 18, 2021 at Google I/O. The platform unifies the previous Google Cloud AI Platform and AutoML services under a single UI and API, and covers the full ML lifecycle: data preparation, training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring.

The platform provides access to Model Garden with 200+ models (Google Gemini, partner models such as Anthropic's Claude, open-source models such as Llama), Vertex AI Studio for prompt design and testing, Vertex AI Agent Builder for building AI agents, Vertex AI Pipelines for ML workflow orchestration, Vertex AI Feature Store, Vertex AI Evaluation, and Vertex AI Vector Search. It supports both AutoML (code-free) and custom training workflows.

Vertex AI is available as a managed cloud service on Google Cloud and through Vertex AI on Distributed Cloud for air-gapped on-premises environments. The platform supports CMEK, VPC Service Controls, IAM-based role-based access control, audit logs, and data residency. Pricing follows a pay-as-you-go model based on training time, tokens for generative models, and prediction hours.