Would you rather hire a new graduate from an elite university into your company, or the same person, but with 20 years of real-world experience?
That is the difference between adopting generative AI technology in the form of a generic, foundational model, and adopting generative AI in the form of a customizable model that can learn from and leverage your firm’s own, specific data, according to Manuvir Das, head of enterprise computing at Nvidia.
Nvidia has spent the last several months positioning its platforms and technology to enable customized generative AI for enterprises, and its latest step is to form a tight bond with Snowflake, a company that helps many enterprises store their data in the cloud–the data that can be used to create increasingly valuable generative AI solutions customized to the needs of individual firms, the equivalent of that employee with 20 years experience.
The companies announced at Snowflake Summit 2023 in Las vegas this week are providing businesses of all sizes an accelerated path to create customized generative AI applications using their own proprietary data within the Snowflake Data Cloud and their Snowflake accounts in combination with the Nvidia NeMo large language model platform and Nvidia GPU-accelerated computing to make custom LLMs for advanced generative AI services, including chatbots, search and summarization. Uniting these technologies in the cloud means that proprietary enterprise data will not need to be moved, creating the most secure possible scenario for building custom LLMs.
“If enterprise companies need to create custom models for generative AI, based on their data–the data is sitting in Snowflake Data Cloud–then why don't we bring Nvidia’s engine for [large language] model-making, which is NeMo, into Snowflake’s Data Cloud, so that enterprise customers right there on the cloud can produce these models that they can then apply to all the use cases in their business,” Das said.
Frank Slootman, chairman and CEO of Snowflake, who together with Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced the partnership during a fireside chat at the event, added, “Snowflake’s partnership with Nvidia will bring high-performance machine learning and artificial intelligence to our vast volumes of proprietary and structured enterprise data, a new frontier to bringing unprecedented insights, predictions and prescriptions to the global world of business.”
“More enterprises than we expected are training or at least fine-tuning their own AI models, as they increasingly appreciate the value of their own data assets,” said Alexander Harrowell, principal analyst for advanced computing for AI at technology research group Omdia, in a statement provided by Nvidia. “Similarly, enterprises are beginning to operate more diverse fleets of AI models for business-specific applications. Supporting them in this trend is one of the biggest open opportunities in the sector.”
Getting its technology into the Snowflake Data Cloud should allow Nvidia to gain access to many more of the enterprises that are ready to explore customized generative AI, as the platform has more than 8,000 customers worldwide.