AI has become the topic on everyone’s mind, on everyone’s lips and at everyone’s fingertips.
As part of the opening keynote of this year’s Snowflake Summit, Sarah Guo, founder and CEO of early-stage venture capital firm Conviction, kicked things off by leading a fireside chat with Frank Slootman, Chairman and CEO of Snowflake, and Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. The two leaders spoke about their newly announced partnership and the ways they expect to bring AI to data in the cloud.
According to the companies’ joint press release, “NVIDIA and Snowflake’s collaboration represents a new opportunity for enterprises. It will enable them to use their proprietary data — which can range from hundreds of terabytes to petabytes of raw and curated business information — to create and fine-tune custom [large language models] that power business-specific applications and services.”
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AI Will Enable Quicker Time to Value for New Apps
Huang explained, “Back in the old days, we used to bring data to the computer. And the reason for that is because there was so little data in those days.”
But today, he said, the volume of data being generated is gigantic. “The data is valuable. It has to be secure. It's regulated. Governance has to be incredible. And so, it's tough to move data around.”
While a big part of the partnership is about bringing AI to Snowflake, Huang said, “the big revolution is about the combination of data plus AI algorithms plus compute engine. Our collaboration brings those three things together — incredibly valuable data, creative AI and a great compute engine.”
The value behind the partnership is what it will allow organizations to do with their proprietary data in a short amount of time. “For the very first time, you can develop a large language model, you stick it in front of your data and you talk to it. You talk to your data like you talk to a person,” Huang said. “The combination of a large language model plus knowledge base equals an AI application as simple as that.”
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Huang offered the customer contact center as a possible use case where AI can accelerate the time to value for all of the data being generated. “Can you imagine if you have hundreds of your customer support agents sitting in front of you, and you just ask them a bunch of questions? That's the future.”
He called this kind of interaction a miracle. “You're going to ask, what are the most frequent things that are happening to our customers that we could improve on? What are the things that they seem to find really delightful from our products? You're going to turn customer service data into a customer service application. That's an incredible opportunity.”
NVIDIA’s Pre-Trained Models Will Accelerate App Development
Slootman noted the benefits that NVIDIA’s partnership will lend to Snowflake’s data cloud. “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 of bringing unprecedented insights, predictions and prescriptions to the global world of business.”
NVIDIA is bringing to the table its NeMo platform for developing large language models and its GPU-accelerated computing. “When you use our NeMo AI Foundation service inside Snowflake, the first thing you get is a state-of-the-art, pre-trained model,” Huang explained. “All of those models are a lot more cost-effective to train, so now you've adapted that pre-trained model to your functionality, to your guardrails, to be able to optimize for the type of skills or functionality you would like to have.”
The ability to augment these pre-trained models with an organization’s proprietary data will enable users “to develop AI applications connected to your data at Snowflake in a matter of days, not months,” Huang added.
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