The Snowflake Summit 2023, the company’s annual user conference, witnessed a number of LLM-based announcements and a host of enhancements to the company’s Data Cloud platform. The most notable one, perhaps, is its Document AI which stems from Snowflake’s acquisition of Applica (Sept. 2022) and leverages its purpose-built, multimodal LLM.  Document AI, which is currently in private preview, will enable businesses to extract and leverage unstructured data from documents. 

Over the next five years, over 90 percent of the world’s data will be unstructured in the form of documents, images, video, audio, and more according to IDC2. This massive volume of unstructured data is routinely stored by organizations, however gaining valuable insight from it has historically required manual, error-prone processes and limited expert skillsets. Snowflake’s built-in Document AI will make it easier for organizations to understand and derive value from unstructured data and documents using natural language processing, said Murad Wagh, Director of Sales Engineering at Snowflake, while addressing the Indian media.

Some of the use case examples include the ability to easily extract content like invoice amounts or contractual terms from documents and fine-tune results using a visual interface and natural language. Snowflake is starting with Document AI and plans to expand these capabilities to more types of unstructured data.

Additionally, the company also announced updates for Iceberg Tables, which will enable organizations to work with data in their own storage in the Apache Iceberg format, whether that data is managed by Snowflake or managed externally. Snowflake also announced that its platform will support a broader set of advanced analytics capabilities including pre-built machine learning functions for SQL users (public preview), and is expanding its unified governance and privacy with new data quality metrics and classification features (both in private preview). 

The post Snowflake introduces LLM-driven Document AI for unstructured data use cases  appeared first on CIO Dimension.

Snowflake and NVIDIA announced that they are partnering to provide businesses with a platform to create customized generative AI applications using their own proprietary data in the Snowflake Data Cloud. The announcement came today at Snowflake Summit 2023.

With NVIDIA NeMo platform for developing large language models (LLMs) and NVIDIA GPU-accelerated computing, Snowflake customers can use data in their Snowflake accounts to make custom LLMs for advanced generative AI services, including chatbots, search and summarization. Snowflake plans to host and run NeMo in the 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 to bringing unprecedented insights, predictions and prescriptions to the global world of business,” said Frank Slootman, chairman and CEO, Snowflake.

“Data is essential to creating generative AI applications that understand the complex operations and unique voice of every company,” said Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO, NVIDIA. “Together, NVIDIA and Snowflake will create an AI factory that helps enterprises turn their own valuable data into custom generative AI models to power groundbreaking new applications — right from the cloud platform that they use to run their businesses.”

The partnership will enable customers 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 LLMs that power business-specific applications and services. 

The companies maintain that the integration of AI technology from Snowflake and NVIDIA will enable users to quickly build generative AI apps for a number of business use cases. For example, a healthcare insurance model could answer complex questions about what procedures are covered under various plans. A financial services model could share details about specific lending opportunities available to retail and business customers based on a variety of circumstances. 

Another advantage, according to Snowflake, is the ability to create these apps where the governed data already resides – a benefit that reduces cost and latency while maintaining the security of the data. 

The post NVIDIA’s NeMo comes to Snowflake Data Cloud appeared first on CIO Dimension.