At the Google I/O developer conference on Tuesday, Google announced an addition to the Firebase platform that aims to make it easier for developers to build AI-powered apps in JavaScript/TypeScript, with Go support coming soon.
Firebase Genkit is an open source framework, using the Apache 2.0 license, that allows developers to quickly integrate artificial intelligence into new and existing applications.
Some of the use cases for Genkit highlighted by the company on Tuesday include many of the typical use cases for genetic artificial intelligence: content creation and summarization, text translation and image generation.
“The powerful models of large languages offer the functionality of AI-powered apps, but building and improving these features beyond a prototype is difficult,” wrote Google product manager Chris Gill and developer advocate Peter Friese. in Tuesday’s announcement. “Many of us are still figuring out how to deploy these features to production at scale and understand how they perform so we can quickly iterate and improve them. Add to this the need to balance security and stability throughout the process and the problem becomes even more difficult. Let’s face it, everyone can use some help.”
The Firebase team promises that developers will be able to use Genkit immediately because it uses the same approaches as the rest of the Firebase toolchain. Using Genkit, they will be able to test their new features locally and then develop their application with the help of Google’s serverless platforms such as Cloud Functions for Firebase and Google Cloud Run.
Because 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 in addition to Google’s Gemini models, for example, developers can use open models through Ollama. Genkit will also support vector databases such as Chrome, Pinecone and PostgreSQL’s pgvector, in addition to Google Cloud Firestore.
“Genkit is also designed to be open to all models, vector stores, builtins, 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 that is now generally available, will support Genkit’s developer interface out of the box.
In addition to Genkit, the Firebase team also announced today support for SQL databases, powered by Firebase Data Connect, a new service powered by Google’s Cloud SQL Postgres database.
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Also new is Firebase App Hosting, which Google describes as “next-generation serverless web hosting with Google, designed specifically for server-rendered web applications.” Firebase App Hosting is a serverless web hosting solution that will manage everything from app creation to CDN for content distribution and server-side performance for developers.
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