Snowflake Brings Industry-Leading Enterprise AI to Even More Users with New Advancements to Snowflake Cortex AI and Snowflake ML
Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW) announced new advancements in its AI technology at the Snowflake Summit 2024, focusing on Snowflake Cortex AI and Snowflake ML. These enhancements aim to make enterprise AI more accessible, efficient, and secure. Key updates include new chat capabilities through Snowflake Cortex Analyst and Snowflake Cortex Search, allowing users to develop chatbots quickly. Also unveiled were Snowflake Cortex Guard for data security, Document AI for document content extraction, and Snowflake Copilot for text-to-SQL conversion. The new Snowflake AI & ML Studio offers a no-code interface for AI development. Snowflake ML provides unified MLOps capabilities for seamless model and feature management. These innovations help organizations extract more value from their data while ensuring security and governance.
- Introduction of new chat capabilities, Snowflake Cortex Analyst and Snowflake Cortex Search, allowing rapid chatbot development.
- Launch of Snowflake Cortex Guard for enhanced data security, filtering harmful content.
- Document AI and Snowflake Copilot improve operational efficiency by automating content extraction and SQL generation.
- Availability of Snowflake AI & ML Studio, a no-code development interface, democratizing AI usage.
- Unified MLOps capabilities in Snowflake ML streamline model and feature management.
- Partnership with NVIDIA to bolster AI data applications development.
- No specific financial performance metrics provided in the announcement.
- Potential challenges in integrating new models and features across existing workflows.
- Dependency on third-party large language models (LLMs) like Meta's Llama 3 may pose vendor risks.
- Operational complexity in scaling new AI applications across large enterprises.
Insights
Snowflake's recent advancements in AI and ML technology demonstrate their commitment to leading the AI Data Cloud market. This aligns with their strategic goals to expand their customer base and enhance product offerings, potentially driving revenue growth. The new no-code AI development capabilities and integrated machine learning lifecycle experience can attract a broader range of users, thus increasing adoption rates and recurring revenue.
From a financial perspective, these innovations could justify a premium valuation for Snowflake's stock, given the rising demand for accessible AI tools in the enterprise sector. However, investors should remain cautious about the potential increase in R&D expenses and whether these new products indeed translate into substantial revenue growth. The competition in the AI space is fierce and continuous innovation is necessary to maintain market leadership.
Snowflake’s new AI and ML enhancements underscore their focus on cutting-edge technological advancements. The introduction of chat experiences powered by LLMs like Meta’s Llama 3 and the integration of servers with no-code AI interfaces can drastically reduce the entry barriers for AI adoption in enterprises. This is significant because it democratizes access to sophisticated AI tools, enabling organizations to leverage AI without needing extensive technical expertise.
The unified platform for generative AI and ML further strengthens Snowflake’s position as a comprehensive solution provider, ensuring data security, governance and control. This can be a major differentiator in the market, where data privacy and compliance are paramount. Additionally, the integration with high-performing models like Snowflake Arctic-TILT presents a strong case for improved operational efficiency and streamlined processes.
Snowflake’s expansion into AI and ML with easy-to-use tools and robust security measures is a notable move within the enterprise data cloud market. By targeting non-technical users with no-code interfaces and pre-built AI models, Snowflake is likely to see a growth in its user demographic. This aligns with market trends favoring broader AI democratization across industries.
The announcement timing at their annual user conference, Snowflake Summit 2024, plays a strategic role in building market momentum and user anticipation. However, the market will need to see tangible results and customer testimonials to fully buy into these claims. Snowflake's focus on AI governance and security could also position it favorably in sectors with stringent compliance requirements, further enhancing its market appeal.
Snowflake Cortex AI delivers easy, efficient, and trusted enterprise AI to thousands of organizations — making it simple to create custom chat experiences, fine-tune best-in-class models, and expedite no-code AI development
Snowflake Cortex AI delivers easy, efficient, and trusted enterprise AI to thousands of organizations — making it simple to create custom chat experiences, fine-tune best-in-class models, and expedite no-code AI development (Graphic: Business Wire)
“Snowflake is at the epicenter of enterprise AI, putting easy, efficient, and trusted AI in the hands of every user so they can solve their most complex business challenges, without compromising on security or governance,” said Baris Gultekin, Head of AI, Snowflake. “Our latest advancements to Snowflake Cortex AI remove the barriers to entry so all organizations can harness AI to build powerful AI applications at scale and unlock unique differentiation with their enterprise data in the AI Data Cloud.”
Give Your Entire Enterprise the Power to Talk to Data Through New Chat Experiences
LLM-powered chatbots are a powerful way for any user to ask questions from their enterprise data using natural language, unlocking the insights organizations need for critical decision-making with increased speed and efficiency. Snowflake is unveiling two new chat capabilities, Snowflake Cortex Analyst (public preview soon) and Snowflake Cortex Search (public preview soon), allowing users to develop these chatbots in a matter of minutes against their structured and unstructured data, without operational complexity. Cortex Analyst, built with Meta’s Llama 3 and Mistral Large models, allows businesses to securely build applications on top of their analytical data in Snowflake. In addition, Cortex Search harnesses state-of-the-art retrieval and ranking technology from Neeva (acquired by Snowflake in May 2023) alongside Snowflake Arctic embed, so users can build applications against documents and other text-based datasets through enterprise-grade hybrid search — a combination of both vector and text — as a service.
“Data security and governance are of the utmost importance for Zoom when leveraging AI for our enterprise analytics. We rely on the Snowflake AI Data Cloud to support our internal business functions and develop customer insights as we continue to democratize AI across our organization,” said Awinash Sinha, Corporate CIO, Zoom. “By combining the power of Snowflake Cortex AI and Streamlit, we’ve been able to quickly build apps leveraging pre-trained large language models in just a few days. This is empowering our teams to use AI to quickly and easily access helpful answers.”
“Although businesses typically use dashboards to consume information from their data for strategic decision-making, this approach has some drawbacks including information overload, limited flexibility, and time-consuming development,” said Mukesh Dubey, Product Owner Data Platform, CH NA, Bayer. “What if internal functional users could ask specific questions directly on their enterprise data and get responses back with basic visualizations? The core of this capability is high-quality responses to a natural language query on structured data, used in an operationally sustainable way. This is exactly what Snowlake Cortex Analyst enables for us. What I’m most excited about is we're just getting started, and we're looking forward to unlocking more value with Snowflake Cortex AI."
Data security is key to building production-grade AI applications and chat experiences, and then scaling them across enterprises. As a result, Snowflake is unveiling Snowflake Cortex Guard (generally available soon), which leverages Meta’s Llama Guard, an LLM-based input-output safeguard that filters and flags harmful content across organizational data and assets, such as violence and hate, self-harm, or criminal activities. With Cortex Guard, Snowflake is further unlocking trusted AI for enterprises, helping customers ensure that available models are safe and usable.
Snowflake Strengthens AI Experiences to Accelerate Productivity
In addition to enabling the easy development of custom chat experiences, Snowflake is providing customers with pre-built AI-powered experiences, which are fueled by Snowflake’s world-class models. With Document AI (generally available soon), users can easily extract content like invoice amounts or contract terms from documents using Snowflake’s industry-leading multimodal LLM, Snowflake Arctic-TILT, which outperforms GPT-4 and secured a top score in the DocVQA benchmark test — the standard for visual document question answering. Organizations including Northern Trust harness Document AI to intelligently process documents at scale to lower operational overhead with higher efficiency. Snowflake is also advancing its breakthrough text-to-SQL assistant, Snowflake Copilot (generally available soon), which combines the strengths of Mistral Large with Snowflake’s proprietary SQL generation model to accelerate productivity for every SQL user.
Unlock No-Code AI Development with the New Snowflake AI & ML Studio
Snowflake Cortex AI provides customers with a robust set of state-of-the-art models from leading providers including Google, Meta, Mistral AI, and Reka, in addition to Snowflake’s top-tier open source LLM Snowflake Arctic, to accelerate AI development. Snowflake is further democratizing how any user can bring these powerful models to their enterprise data with the new Snowflake AI & ML Studio (private preview), a no-code interactive interface for teams to get started with AI development and productize their AI applications faster. In addition, users can easily test and evaluate these models to find the best and most cost-effective fit for their specific use cases, ultimately accelerating the path to production while optimizing operating costs.
To help organizations further enhance LLM performance and deliver more personalized experiences, Snowflake is introducing Cortex Fine-Tuning (now public preview), accessible through AI & ML Studio or a simple SQL function. This serverless customization is available for a subset of Meta and Mistral AI models. These fine-tuned models can then be easily used through a Cortex AI function, with access managed using Snowflake role-based access controls.
Streamline Model and Feature Management with Unified, Governed MLOps Through Snowflake ML
Once ML models and LLMs are developed, most organizations struggle with continuously operating them in production on evolving data sets. Snowflake ML brings MLOps capabilities to the AI Data Cloud, so teams can seamlessly discover, manage, and govern their features, models, and metadata across the entire ML lifecycle — from data pre-processing to model management. These centralized MLOps capabilities also integrate with the rest of Snowflake’s platform, including Snowflake Notebooks and Snowpark ML for a simple end-to-end experience.
Snowflake’s suite of MLOps capabilities include the Snowflake Model Registry (now generally available), which allows users to govern the access and use of all types of AI models so they can deliver more personalized experiences and cost-saving automations with trust and efficiency. In addition, Snowflake is announcing the Snowflake Feature Store (now public preview), an integrated solution for data scientists and ML engineers to create, store, manage, and serve consistent ML features for model training and inference, and ML Lineage (private preview), so teams can trace the usage of features, datasets, and models across the end-to-end ML lifecycle.
Continued Innovation at Snowflake Summit 2024
Snowflake also announced new innovations to its single, unified platform that provide thousands of organizations with increased flexibility and interoperability across their data; new tools that accelerate how developers build in the AI Data Cloud; a new collaboration with NVIDIA that customers and partners can harness to build customized AI data applications in Snowflake; the Polaris Catalog, a vendor-neutral, fully open catalog implementation for Apache Iceberg; and more at Snowflake Summit 2024.
Learn More:
- Read more about how AI and ML innovations enable users to talk to their data, security customize LLMs, and streamline model operations in this blog post.
- Stay on top of the latest news and announcements from Snowflake on LinkedIn and Twitter / X.
Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains express and implied forward-looking statements, including statements regarding (i) Snowflake’s business strategy, (ii) Snowflake’s products, services, and technology offerings, including those that are under development or not generally available, (iii) market growth, trends, and competitive considerations, and (iv) the integration, interoperability, and availability of Snowflake’s products with and on third-party platforms. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including those described under the heading “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in the Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and the Annual Reports on Form 10-K that Snowflake files with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In light of these risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, actual results could differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied in the forward-looking statements. As a result, you should not rely on any forward-looking statements as predictions of future events.
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About Snowflake
Snowflake makes enterprise AI easy, efficient and trusted. Thousands of companies around the globe, including hundreds of the world’s largest, use Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to share data, build applications, and power their business with AI. The era of enterprise AI is here. Learn more at snowflake.com (NYSE: SNOW).
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240604216985/en/
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Source: Snowflake Inc.
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