At the Google I/O developer conference on Tuesday, Google announced an addition to its Firebase platform aimed at making it easier for developers to build AI-powered applications in JavaScript/TypeScript, with Go support coming soon. Arriving.
Firebase Genkit is an open source framework using the Apache 2.0 license, which enables developers to rapidly build AI into new and existing applications.
Some of the Genkit use cases the company is highlighting Tuesday include many of the standard generative AI use cases: content creation and summarization, text translation and image creation.
“Powerful big language models make AI-powered app features within reach, but these features are difficult to build and refine beyond a prototype,” Google product manager Chris Gill and developer advocate Peter Freese wrote in Tuesday's announcement. Is.” “Many of us are still figuring out how to deploy these features in production at scale and understand how they're performing so we can quickly iterate and improve on them. Add to that the need to balance security and stability throughout the process and the problem becomes even more difficult. Let's face it, everyone can help.
The Firebase team promises that developers will be able to jump into using Jenkit because it uses the same approach as the rest of the Firebase toolchain. Using Genkit, they will be able to test their new features locally and then deploy their application using Google's serverless platforms such as Cloud Functions for Firebase and Google Cloud Run.
Since it's open source, developers will be able to extend Genkit as needed, but out of the box, it already supports a number of third-party open source projects. This means that on top of Google's own Gemini models, for example, developers can use open models through Ulama. In addition to Google Cloud Firestore, Genkit will also support vector databases like Chrome, Pinecone and PostgreSQL's pgvector.
“Genkit is also designed to be open to any and all models, vector stores, embedders, evaluators, and other components through its plugin system,” the team writes.
Google also notes that Project IDX, Google's next-generation web-based integrated developer environment now generally available, will support Genkit's developer UI out of the box.
In addition to Genkit, the Firebase team also announced support for SQL Database today, powered by Firebase Data Connect, a new service powered by Google's Cloud SQL Postgres database.
Also new is Firebase App Hosting, which Google describes as “the next generation of serverless web hosting with Google, designed specifically for server-delivered web apps.” Firebase App Hosting is a serverless web hosting solution that will manage everything from application creation to CDN to content distribution and server-side rendering for developers.
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