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Snowflake AND Nvidia have teamed up to provide companies with a platform to build custom generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications within the Snowflake Data Cloud using a company’s proprietary data. The announcement came today at Snowflake Summit 2023.
The integration of Nvidia’s NeMo platform for large language models (LLM) and its GPU-accelerated computing with Snowflake capabilities will enable companies to leverage their data in Snowflake accounts to develop LLM for advanced AI services generative like chatbot, search and summary.
Manuvir Das, head of enterprise information technology at Nvidia, told VentureBeat that this partnership sets itself apart by allowing customers to customize their AI models in the cloud to meet their specific business needs. They can “work with their proprietary data to build… state-of-the-art generative AI applications without moving them from the secure Data Cloud environment. This will reduce costs and latency while maintaining data security.”
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, emphasized the importance of data in developing generative AI applications that understand each company’s unique voice and operations.
“Together, Nvidia and Snowflake will create an AI factory that helps businesses transform their valuable data into custom generative AI models to power game-changing new applications, directly from the cloud platform they use to run their businesses,” he said. Huang in a written statement.
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According to Nvidia, the collaboration will provide companies with new opportunities to leverage their proprietary data, which can range from hundreds of terabytes to petabytes of raw and curated business information. They can use this data to create and refine custom LLMs, enabling the development of business-specific applications and services.
Simplifying the development of Generative AI through the cloud
Nvidia’s Das says companies using custom generative AI models trained on their proprietary data will maintain a competitive edge over those relying on vendor-specific models.
He said that using tuning or other techniques to tailor LLMs produces a customized AI model that allows applications to leverage institutional knowledge – accumulated information related to branding, voice, policies and interactions operations of a company with customers.
“One way to think about customizing a model is to compare the output of a base model with a new employee who just graduated, versus an employee who has been with the company for more than 20 years,” Das told VentureBeat. “The longtime employee has acquired the institutional knowledge necessary to solve problems quickly and with accurate insights.”
Creating an LLM involves training a predictive model using a large body of data. Das said that for best results, abundant data, a robust model, and accelerated processing capabilities are essential. The new collaboration encompasses all three factors.
“More than 8,000 Snowflake customers store exabytes of data in Snowflake Data Cloud. As enterprises look to add AI capabilities to their applications and services, this data is the fuel for building custom AI models,” said Das. “Nvidia NeMo running on our accelerated compute platform and based on pre-trained base models will provide the software resources and compute within the Snowflake Data Cloud to make generative AI accessible to enterprises.”
Nvidia’s NeMo is a cloud-native enterprise platform that allows users to build, customize, and deploy generative AI models with billions of parameters. Snowflake plans to host and run NeMo within the Snowflake Data Cloud, enabling customers to develop and deploy custom LLMs for generative AI applications.
“Data is the fuel for AI,” Das said. “By building custom models using their data on the Snowflake Data Cloud, companies will be able to harness the transformative potential of Generative AI to advance their businesses with AI-powered applications that deeply understand their business and domains in which they operate”.
What’s next for Nvidia and Snowflake?
Nvidia also announced its commitment to offer accelerated computing and a full suite of AI software as part of the collaboration. The company said significant co-engineering efforts are underway, with plans to integrate Nvidia’s AI engine into Snowflake’s Data Cloud.
Das said Generative AI is one of the most transformative technologies of our time, potentially impacting nearly every business function.
“Generative AI is a multi-billion dollar opportunity and has the potential to transform every industry as companies begin to build and deploy custom models using their valuable data,” said Das. “As a platform company, we are currently helping our partners and customers harness the power of AI to solve humanity’s biggest problems with accelerated computing and full-stack software designed to meet the unique needs of practically every sector”.
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