Oracle's Generative AI Frenzy Begins

2024-01-24

Oracle is integrating generative AI capabilities into its entire OCI technology stack. Vinod Mamtani, Vice President of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and General Manager of Generative AI Services, revealed Oracle's plans, which include the full launch of generative AI services, the introduction of generative AI agents, and the introduction of data science AI quick actions.


IDC Group Vice President Ritu Jyoti said, "By integrating generative AI into the common architecture of the Oracle ecosystem, the company is bringing generative AI to places where cloud data centers and internal environments already have EB customer data."


It is worth noting that this enterprise-friendly cloud service provider added generative AI services to several applications in the Oracle application suite last year, including HCM, SCM, CX, ERP, NetSuite, and a range of other industry-specific models.


Integration of Llama 2


The recent popularity of Llama 2 has not escaped OCI's attention, as it now hosts Llama 2 with 70 billion parameters. Interestingly, this is the first time OCI has hosted a model other than Cohere.


When asked about OCI's shift to Llama 2, Mamtani said, "Regarding Llama 2, we noticed the interest and acceptance among developers, which is why we believe it is very useful for our customers."


In addition to hosting Llama 2, OCI now also hosts Cohere's 52 billion embedded models. Mamtani said, "If you look at the rankings, Cohere's embedded models rank high. It supports both English and multilingual embeddings." He explained that regardless of the language used, the generated embeddings will be in the same space.


Betting on Generative AI Agents


Enterprises have vast document repositories. As LLM is trained on public datasets, they do not know all the information in these documents. To address this, OCI has introduced retrieval-enhanced generative agents in its OpenSearch. Users can now simply attach their own documents to it and start chatting with it in natural language.


Mamtani explained, "It will provide context-based responses, reducing illusions. We are inserting support for OpenSearch. Users can now transparently access various enterprise datasets in natural language without the need for specialized skills or knowledge of the data's format or storage location."


Oracle will also provide pre-built agent operations in its SaaS application suite, including Oracle Fusion Cloud applications suite, Oracle NetSuite, and Oracle Health, among others.


Mamtani said, "We have complex workflows in our SaaS application suite. Therefore, we want to achieve automation and simplification. We will consider building agents specifically for these applications."


In addition, Mamtani stated that Oracle plans to introduce the Code Gen Agent for Java applications. "Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, so we are best suited to have agents for the Java language," he added.


AI Quick Actions


AI Quick Actions fundamentally provide no-code, low-code solutions for deployment and fine-tuning. To help customers build, train, deploy, and manage LLM using open-source libraries such as Hugging Face's Transformers or PyTorch, Oracle has also expanded the capabilities of OCI Data Science.


Mamtani concluded, "We want to cater to a wide range of data scientists and machine learning practitioners. Achieving what all developers want to try and use all other open-source models."