The digital era turned the traditional formula for media and entertainment success on its head, ushering in new technologies that have changed how content is produced, distributed, experienced, and monetized. Audiences have more choice, flexibility, and power over what they consume, and today’s media companies have to embrace ongoing transformation or risk falling behind – or becoming irrelevant. 

A new wave of transformation is arriving with generative AI, a type of artificial intelligence that can interact with users in natural language and create novel data, ranging from story outlines, reports, and other text outputs to multimodal content like images, videos, and audio. Media and entertainment are inherently about content creation and creativity—so what does this new technology mean for the industry? 

At Google Cloud, we see tremendous opportunity for creative industries, from more efficient creation methods to improved user experiences. Let’s explore.

AI for media with Google Cloud

Google Cloud has a long history with large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI technologies—from their influence over the years on products like Document AI, to recent announcements like Generative AI support in Vertex AI, which lets businesses access and tune generative AI foundation models, and Generative AI App Builder, which lets developers build chatbots and other generative apps in minutes.  

We’ve helped our global media and entertainment customers with AI for personalization, search and recommendations, predictive analytics, and much more — and with generative AI now on the rise, we have some ideas to help media leaders, technologists, and creators think about and prepare to utilize powerful AI in their work. 

Three lenses on innovation in media

The media and entertainment industry is increasingly diverse and complex, with companies spanning over-the-top (OTT) subscription streaming services, 24-hour linear channels, live broadcasts of sporting events, digital journalism, traditional publishing, short-form user-generated social video, and more. More and more, the boundaries between these segments of the media industry are blurring — but common to them all is the focus on providing compelling content in an engaging audience experience that can be directly or indirectly monetized.

With this in mind, we suggest media and entertainment companies look at the application of innovative technologies like generative AI through the following three lenses:

1. Improving content creation, production, and management
2. Enhancing and personalizing audience experiences
3. Improving monetization

Improving content creation, production, and management

Generative AI democratizes many aspects of content creation, opening new ways to create written material, illustrations, sound effects, special effects, and more. Its recent maturation has been so rapid, some in the media industry have expressed concern that generative AI implies the end of creative professions. We think the opposite is more likely: just as photography, audio recordings, and computer generated images have enabled new modes of creativity, rather than making old ones obsolete, generative AI has the potential to both enable new forms of expression and enhance familiar ones. 

For example, journalists could use generative AI to speed up research by helping them synthesize and analyze large volumes of information, or to help them create initial drafts or summaries of editorial content. Film and television producers could leverage the technology to accelerate the post-production editing process, with new AI-enabled interfaces for rapidly adjusting or enhancing scene details such as lighting and color. Broadcasters could use generative AI to make vast libraries of video footage searchable and accessible for use in telling more compelling stories. The potential use cases go on and on.

Far from undermining incredible creative professions, generative AI is poised to free writers, artists, editors, and many others from the tedious and mundane aspects of their work, empowering them to focus more of their time on creativity.

Enhancing and personalizing audience experiences

Every media organization in the world today faces the reality that for most consumers, switching costs are extremely low. This puts incredible pressure on these companies to invest in delivering low-friction and compelling audience experiences that help mitigate subscribers from churning and viewers from abandoning content experiences for competitive platforms. 

Generative AI can help media companies engage and retain viewers, such as by enabling more powerful search and recommendations on their digital content platforms. With its increasingly multimodal capabilities extending from natural language to both audio and video content, generative AI is well-positioned to power more personalized audience experiences. 

Consumers often complain about “the paradox of choice” or their inability to find something interesting to watch on streaming platforms that have incredibly vast libraries of content available on demand. Imagine a not-too-distant future wherein a consumer can simply ask the content platform they’re using to help them find a specific show to watch based on mood, specific types of scenes, combinations of actors, award nominations, or practically anything they can think to ask. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg — imagine generative AI’s potential to curate, assemble, and even create personalized content for a viewer to consume!

Improving monetization

As consumers’ content consumption further expands from traditional theatrical and linear television programming to include digital offerings across an array of platforms, devices, and content types, media companies face the challenge of maintaining and improving monetization. The conventional economics and approaches to advertising and subscription models are proving, in many cases, not to deliver sufficient ROI. 

Generative AI has the potential to help media companies improve their monetization of audience experiences. As mentioned previously, enhanced personalization can play a role in mitigating churn, which in turn can help sustain and grow subscription and advertising revenues. Going beyond this, generative AI can be leveraged to drive even greater advertising revenues via more targeted, contextual, and personalized advertisements. Imagine both display and video advertisements that are generated on the fly to personalize product specifics, messaging, style, colors, and innumerable other characteristics to drive greater engagement and higher click-through rates (CTR), and thus higher advertising CPMs (cost per thousand impressions).

Coming up next

Generative AI presents a significant opportunity for media companies to fundamentally transform content creation, engagement, and monetization. Compelling services are already on the market — but there is far more to come. 

Google Cloud continues to build on its deep experience and expertise with AI, and we are committed to working with the industry to develop compelling, accessible, trusted, and responsible AI solutions that will drive meaningful business outcomes. We are excited to create the future together with our global media customers and partners across the ecosystem. To learn more about this disruptive topic, read “Debunking five generative AI misconceptions” from Google Cloud vice president of AI & Business Solutions Phil Moyer, or explore our Trusted Tester Program for generative AI.

We recently launched Vertex AI to help you move machine learning (ML) from experimentation into production faster and manage your models with confidence—speeding up your ability to improve outcomes at your organization.

But we know many of you are just getting started with ML and there’s a lot to learn! In tandem with building the Vertex AI platform, our teams are dropping as much best practices content as we can to help you come up to speed. Plus, we have a dedicated event on June 10th, Applied ML Summit, with sessions on how to apply ML technology in your projects, as well as grow your skills in this field. 

In the meantime, we couldn’t resist a quick lesson on hyperparameter tuning, because (a) it’s incredibly cool (b) you will impress your coworkers (c) Google Cloud has some unique battle tested tech in this area and (d) you will save time by getting better ML models into production faster. Vertex Vizier, on average, finds optimal parameters for complex functions in over 80% fewer trials than traditional methods. 

So it’s incredibly cool, but what is it?

While machine learning models automatically learn from data, they still require user-defined knobs which guide the learning process. These knobs, commonly known as hyperparameters, control, for example, the tradeoff between training accuracy and generalizability.  Examples of hyperparameters are the optimizer being used, its learning rate, regularization parameters, the number of hidden layers in a DNN, and their sizes.

Setting hyperparameters to their optimal values for a given dataset can make a huge difference in model quality. Typically, optimal hyperparameter values are found via grid searching a small number of combinations, or tedious manual experimentation. Hyperparameter tuning automates this work for you by searching for the best configuration of hyperparameters for optimal model performance. 

Vertex Vizier enables automated hyperparameter tuning in several ways:

1. “Traditional” hyperparameter tuning: by this we mean finding the optimal value of hyperparameters by measuring a single objective metric which is the output of an ML model.  For example, Vizier selects the number of hidden layers and their sizes, an optimizer and its learning rate, with the goal of maximizing model accuracy.
2. When hyperparameters are evaluated, models are trained and evaluated on splits of the data set. If evaluation metrics are streamed to Vizier (e.g. as a function of epoch) as the model is trained, Vizier’s early stopping algorithms can predict the final objective value, and recommend which unpromising trials should be early stopped. This conserves compute resources and speeds up convergence.
3. Oftentimes, models are tuned sequentially on different data sets. Vizier’s built in transfer learning learns priors from previous hyperparameter tuning studies, and leverages them to converge faster on subsequent hyperparameter tuning studies.
4. AutoML is a variant of #1, where Vertex Vizier performs both model selection, and also tunes architectures/non-architecture modifying hyperparameters. AutoML usually requires more code on top of Vertex Vizier (to ingest data etc), but Vizier is in most cases the “engine” behind the process. AutoML is implemented by defining a tree like (DAG) search space, rather than a “flat” search space (like in #1). Note that you can use DAG search spaces for any other purpose where searching over a hierarchical space makes sense.
5. There are times when you may wish to optimize more than one metric. For example, we would like to optimize model accuracy, while minimizing model latency. Vizier can find the Pareto frontier, which presents tradeoffs for multiple metrics, allowing users to choose the appropriate tradeoff. Simple example: I want to make a more accurate model, but would like to minimize serving latency. I do not know ahead of time what’s the tradeoff between the two metrics. Vizier can be used to explore and plot a tradeoff curve, so users can select on the most appropriate one. For example, “a latency decrease of 200ms will only decrease accuracy by 0.5%”

Google Vizier is all yours with Vertex AI

Google published the Vizier research paper in 2017, sharing our work and use cases for black-box optimization—i.e. The process of finding the best settings for a bunch of parameters or knobs when you can’t peer inside a system to see how well the knobs are working. The paper discusses our requirements, infrastructure design, underlying algorithms, and advanced features such as transfer learning that the service provides. Vizier has been essential to our progress with machine learning at Google, which is why we are so excited to make it available to you on Vertex AI.

Vizier has already tuned millions of ML models at Google, and its algorithms are continuously improved for faster convergence and handling of real-life edge cases. Vertex Vizier’s models are very well calibrated and are self-tuning (they adapt to user data), and offer unique power features, such as hierarchical search spaces and multi-objective optimization. We believe Vertex Vizier’s set of features is a unique capability to Google Cloud, and look forward to optimizing the quality of your models by automatically tuning hyperparameters for you.

To learn more about Vertex Vizier, check out these docs and if you are interested in what’s coming in machine learning over the next five years, tune in to our Applied ML Summit on June 10th, or watch the sessions on demand in your own time.

Establishing a mature MLOps practice to build and operationalize ML systems can take years to get right.  We recently published our MLOps framework to help organizations come up to speed faster in this important domain.  

As you start your MLOps journey, you might not need to implement all of these processes and capabilities. Some will have a higher priority than others, depending on the type of workload and business value that they create for you, balanced against the cost of building or buying processes or capabilities. 

To help ML practitioners translate the framework into actionable steps, this blog post highlights some of the factors that influence where to begin, based on our experience in working with customers. 

The following table shows the recommended capabilities (indicated by check marks) based on the characteristics of your use case, but remember that each use case is unique and might have exceptions. (For definitions of the capabilities, see the MLOps framework.)

Your use case might have multiple characteristics. For example, consider a recommender system that’s retrained frequently and that serves batch predictions. In that case, you need the data processing, model training, model evaluation, ML pipelines, model registry, and metadata and artifact tracking capabilities for frequent retraining. You also need a model serving capability for batch serving.

In the following sections, we provide details about each of the characteristics and the capabilities that we recommend for them.

Pilot

Example: A research project for experimenting with a new natural language model for sentiment analysis.

For testing a proof of concept, your focus is typically on data preparation, feature engineering, model prototyping, and validation. You perform these tasks using the experimentation and data processing capabilities. Data scientists want to set up experiments quickly and easily and track and compare them. Therefore, you need the ML metadata and artifact tracking capability in order to debug, to provide traceability and lineage, to share and track experimentation configurations, and to manage ML artifacts. For large-scale pilots, you might also require dedicated model training and evaluation capabilities.

Mission-critical

Example: An equities trading model where model performance degradation in production can put millions of dollars at stake.

In a mission-critical use case, failure with the training process or production model has a significant negative impact on the business (a legal, ethical, reputational, or financial risk). The model evaluation capability is important to identify bias and fairness, as well as to provide explainability of the model. Additionally, monitoring is essential to assess the quality of the model during training and to assess how it performs in production. Online experimentation lets you test newly trained models against the one in production using a controlled environment before you replace the deployed model. Such use cases also need a robust model governance process to store, evaluate, check, release, and report on models and to protect against risks. You can enable model governance by using the model registry and metadata and artifact tracking capabilities. Additionally, datasets and feature repositories provide you with high-quality data assets that are consistent and versioned.

Reusable and collaborative

Example: Customer Analytic Record (CAR) features that are used across various propensity modeling use cases.

Reusable and collaborative assets allow your organization to share, discover, and reuse AI data, source code, and artifacts. A feature store helps you standardize the processes of registering, storing, and accessing features for training and serving ML models. Once features are curated and stored, they can be discovered and reused by multiple data science teams. Having a feature store helps you avoid reengineering features that already exist, and saves time on experimentation. You can also use tools to unify data annotation and categorization. Finally, by using ML metadata and artifacts tracking, you help provide consistency, testability, security and repeatability of the ML workflows. 

Ad hoc retraining

Example: An object detection model to detect various car parts, which needs to be retrained only when new parts are introduced. 

In ad hoc retraining, models are fairly static and you do not retrain them except when the model performance degrades. In these cases, you need data processing, model training, and model evaluation capabilities to train the models. Additionally, because your models are not updated for long periods, you need model monitoring. Model monitoring detects data skews, including schema anomalies, as well as data and concept drifts and shifts. Monitoring also lets you continuously evaluate your model performance, and it alerts you when performance decreases or when data issues are detected. 

Frequent retraining

Example: A fraud detection model that’s trained daily in order to capture recent fraud patterns.

Use cases for frequent retraining are ones where model performance relies on changes in the training data. The retraining might be based on time intervals (for example, daily or weekly), or it could be triggered based on events like when new training data becomes available. For this scenario, you need ML pipelines to connect multiple steps like data extraction, preprocessing, and model training. You also need the model evaluation capability to ensure that the accuracy of the newly trained model meets your business requirements. As the number of models you train grows, both a model registry and metadata and artifact tracking help you keep track of the training jobs and model versions.

Frequent implementation updates

Example: A promotion model with frequent changes to the architecture to maximize conversion rate.

Frequent implementation updates involve changes to the training process itself. That might mean switching to a different ML framework, such as changing the model architecture (for example, LSTM to Attention) or adding a data transformation step in your training pipeline. Such changes in the foundation of your ML workflow require controls to ensure that the new code is functional and that the new model matches or outperforms the previous one. Additionally, the CI/CD process accelerates the time from ML experimentation to production, as well as reducing the possibility for human error. Because the changes are significant, online experimentation is necessary to ensure that the new release is performing as expected. You also need other capabilities such as experimentation, model evaluation, model registry, and metadata and artifact tracking to help you operationalize and track your implementation updates. 

Batch serving

Example: A model that serves weekly recommendations to a user who has just signed up for a video-streaming service.

For batch predictions, there is no need to score in real time. You precompute the scores and you store them for later consumption, so latency is less of a concern than in online serving. However, because you process a large amount of data at a time, throughput is important. Often batch serving is a step in a larger ETL workflow that extracts, pre-processes, scores, and stores data. Therefore, you need the data processing capability and ML pipelines for orchestration. In addition, a model registry can provide your batch serving process with the latest validated model to use for scoring.

Online serving

Example: A RESTful microservice that uses a model to translate text between multiple languages. 

Online inference requires tooling and systems in order to meet latency requirements. The system often needs to retrieve features, to perform inference, and then to return the results according to your serving configurations. A feature repository lets you retrieve features in near real time, and model serving allows you to easily deploy models as an endpoint. Additionally, online experiments help you test new models with a small sample of the serving traffic before you roll the model out to production (for example, by performing A/B testing).

Get started with MLOps using Vertex AI

We recently announced Vertex AI, our unified machine learning platform that helps you implement MLOps to efficiently build and manage ML projects throughout the development lifecycle. You can get started using the following resources: 

• MLOps: Continuous delivery and automation pipelines in machine learning
• Getting started with Vertex AI
• Best practices for implementing machine learning on Google Cloud

^{Acknowledgements: I’d like to thank all the subject matter experts who contributed,  including Alessio Bagnaresi, Alexander Del Toro, Alexander Shires, Erin Kiernan, Erwin Huizenga, Hamsa Buvaraghan, Jo Maitland, Ivan Nardini, Michael Menzel, Nate Keating, Nathan Faggian, Nitin Aggarwal, Olivia Burgess, Satish Iyer, Tuba Islam, and Turan Bulmus. A special thanks to the team that helped create this, Donna Schut, Khalid Salama, and Lara Suzuki, and Mike Pope for his ongoing support.}