Snowflake unveils new AI innovations at Summit 2024

Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud company, has announced a range of new innovations and enhancements to its Snowflake Cortex AI platform at the Snowflake Summit 2024. These updates aim to democratise enterprise AI by making it more accessible, efficient, and secure for a wide array of users.

The new advancements primarily focus on enhancing the ease with which organisations can create AI-powered applications. Notably, Snowflake has introduced new chat capabilities that enable businesses to develop chatbots capable of interacting directly with their enterprise data within minutes. This development aims to expedite the process of obtaining answers and insights from enterprise data.

Baris Gultekin, Head of AI at Snowflake, highlighted the transformative potential of these updates. “Our latest advancements to Snowflake Cortex AI remove the barriers to entry so all organisations can harness AI to build powerful AI applications at scale and unlock unique differentiation with their enterprise data in the AI Data Cloud,” Gultekin said.

Snowflake has launched two new chat capabilities: Snowflake Cortex Analyst and Snowflake Cortex Search. These tools aim to empower users to create chat experiences rapidly, leveraging both structured and unstructured data. Cortex Analyst is built using models from Meta’s Llama and Mistral, allowing businesses to securely create applications based on their analytical data. Meanwhile, Cortex Search employs advanced retrieval and ranking technology acquired from Neeva, providing hybrid search capabilities across various datasets.

Awinash Sinha, Corporate CIO at Zoom, attested to the impact of these new tools. “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,” Sinha remarked.

Mukesh Dubey, Product Owner Data Platform at Bayer, outlined additional benefits. “The core of this capability is high-quality responses to a natural language query on structured data. This is exactly what Snowflake 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,” Dubey said.

Data security and governance remain a high priority. To this end, Snowflake has introduced Snowflake Cortex Guard, which integrates Meta’s Llama Guard technology to filter and flag harmful content across organisational data. This addition is expected to help ensure that the AI models employed by businesses are safe and reliable.

Snowflake also announced new pre-built AI-driven experiences to further aid productivity. The Document AI feature uses Snowflake’s multimodal LLM, Snowflake Arctic-TILT, to extract content from documents, outperforming even GPT-4 in the DocVQA benchmark test. Companies like Northern Trust utilise Document AI to process documents at scale with greater efficiency.

Additionally, the text-to-SQL assistant Snowflake Copilot combines the capabilities of Mistral Large with Snowflake’s proprietary SQL generation model. This tool aims to enhance productivity for SQL users.

To foster no-code AI development, Snowflake introduced the Snowflake AI & ML Studio, which provides an interactive, no-code interface for AI development. The studio is designed to help teams quickly develop and test AI models, accelerating the path to production and optimising operating costs. Additionally, the Cortex Fine-Tuning feature allows for serverless customisation, enhancing LLM performance to deliver more personalised experiences.

Snowflake ML, the company’s unified platform for generative AI and machine learning, now includes advanced MLOps features such as the Snowflake Model Registry and the Snowflake Feature Store. These tools aim to streamline the management and governance of AI models and features across their entire lifecycle.

The Snowflake Summit 2024 also featured announcements of new tools and collaborations, including a partnership with NVIDIA to build customised AI data applications. These developments are expected to provide organisations with increased flexibility and interoperability in their data operations.