Find out why leading AI companies Pinecone and Weights & Biases are joining forces with Microsoft to empower developers and drive innovation. This episode of Six Five On The Road at Microsoft Ignite features Microsoft’s Mike Hulme General Manager, Digital Apps and Innovation, Azure, Chris Van Pelt, Co-founder & CISO at Weights & Biases, and Lauren Nemeth, Chief Operating Officer at Pinecone with host Daniel Newman for a conversation on utilizing Microsoft’s Azure AI Platform to build high-performance AI applications.
Their discussion covers:
- The extensive Azure AI toolchain including frameworks, databases, and LLM observability from leading ISVs
- Azure Native Integrations enhancing the developer experience with ISV services seamlessly in Azure
- The strategic partnership between Microsoft, Weights & Biases, and Pinecone to simplify AI app development
- The growing trend and Microsoft’s strategy in partnering with ISVs to bolster AI solution offerings
- How Pinecone and Weights & Biases aim to drive optimal outcomes through their Microsoft partnership
Learn more at Microsoft Azure.
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Transcript:
Daniel Newman: Hey everyone. The Six Five is On the Road. We are here in Chicago at Microsoft Ignite 2024. My old stomping ground. Spent four decades here. Yes, I moved to Austin, but this will always be Sweet Home Chicago to me. Anyways, really excited for this episode. We’re going to be talking about AI. We’re going to talk about the development of applications, the overall ecosystem, and we’re going to have some great guests here on the show today. So without further ado, I want to bring Mike, Lauren, Chris, all three of you joining from Weights & Biases, Pinecone, Microsoft. And we’re going to talk a little bit on the ecosystem and the partnerships, why you all are partnering with Microsoft, why you’re building with Microsoft. But first and foremost, how are we all doing today?
Mike Hulme: Absolutely.
Lauren Nemeth: Amazing.
Chris Van Pelt: Great to be here. Great.
Lauren Nemeth: Thanks for having us.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. So Mike, let’s start with you. It’s the Microsoft show.
Mike Hulme: You got it.
Daniel Newman: Can’t see the logo over there, here. Talk a little bit about the strategy that you have when it comes to partnering with ISPs. How you’re selecting, picking, building and working together to get to the solutions that the market is looking for.
Mike Hulme: Yeah, absolutely. So the ecosystem is hugely important for us, especially when it comes to really key areas like developers. So if you look across the market, you look at all the startups that have been funded over the last year, actually 27% of them actually fit right in that category of AI toolchain. So developers have access to an incredible set of services, and many of them are getting a ton of traction. They’re being embraced by the developer community,. And it’s really a hallmark of our platform that we make our platform extensible and open and flexible for what developers really need to use in their day-to-day lives.
Some of these tools are really innovative in bringing in new capabilities. So we want to provide direct access to those services for them. Now, we’re going to continue to deliver a complete end-to-end stack of technology from our own services. But actually, we even invite services that you might consider to be competitive to ones that we offer because we want to offer that developer choice and flexibility as much as possible. And you’ve actually seen some great examples here of some new partnerships and some expanded partnerships that we’ve had in our portfolio.
Daniel Newman: Well, I mean, if you think about these heterogeneous environments that most companies, most enterprises are building in, it’s not… As much as every one of the hyperscale cloud providers say they’re building everything here, I think we’ve seen over the last several years, combination, prem, cloud, multi-cloud, the expansion. And I imagine that’s driving the integrations though that you’re picking and choosing and leading with a little bit. Can you please talk a little bit about the integrations that you are driving here and maybe a little bit about specifically here at Ignite?
Mike Hulme: Yeah, absolutely. So we look for a couple of things. One is, are there services like Weights & Biases and Pinecone that are getting tons of traction in the market? We actually want to look for leaders in their spaces and say, if you’re a developer and you’re already using this particular technology, or if you’re an operator and you’re using some technology in that area as well, we actually want you to be able to access that and plug it in really easily. The other thing is we want people to have some confidence. If we’re bringing in a relationship, we want those same organizations to know this is something they can run with confidence, they can start to use that technology. It has some integrations and some great collaborations with Microsoft. And so there’s some momentum behind that to make it even more confident that they can use that technology in their production apps as well.
Daniel Newman: And Chris and Lauren, I’d love to get your take as an industry analyst. We love to hear… Of course, Microsoft will tell us why everyone chooses to build with Microsoft, but as the third party, you’re what we call the ground truth. It’s just part of what we have to do, always trying to discern what are the selection processes, how are you working, how are you building? Chris, I’ll start with you. What was the key criteria for your selection in terms of partnering with Microsoft? And talk a little bit about the depth in the partnership and how that’s developing.
Chris Van Pelt: Sure. So at Weights & Biases, our North Star, our mission is to build the best tools for AI developers. And we’ve sold our tools to over 1,000 enterprises now across many different industries. And many of those enterprises have chosen Azure as their core platform provider. Especially in the new gen AI world, there’s a lot of serious thought and care taken around the security and compliance side of where all this data is flowing, how it moves through these various systems. And companies are trusting Azure to be that silo in many cases. So we really wanted to bring Weights & Biases directly to them and make it super easy for those enterprises to use our tools.
Daniel Newman: And Chris, by the way, just for everyone out there that maybe hasn’t heard of, Lauren, you’ll get this shot too.
Lauren Nemeth: Go for it.
Daniel Newman: But the Weights & Biases, cool name, if you’re in the space and you’ve been in the LLM or building models, you maybe can piece it together. But any backstory on the Weights & Biases name beyond that? What just… Obviously hits me as a AI guy?
Chris Van Pelt: Yeah. When we named the company, we are developers. We love to understand how things work from the inside. And when we thought of the name Weights & Biases, we thought, okay, this is a name where our users, like the ML researchers, the people building the next generation of model are going to know exactly what these words mean for them, whereas the general public might not have a good sense. So there was this insider club nature of it, and I think it’s served us well. I’m a big fan of the name.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s a bit of a… It’s like the speakeasy. I got the knockdown. Lauren.
Lauren Nemeth: Might go less of a speakeasy.
Daniel Newman: Well,
Lauren Nemeth: It’s still a great name. Don’t forget it.
Daniel Newman: It is a unique name. You don’t forget it. And I’d love to hear a little bit about the partnership, but maybe beforehand, since Chris just gave us a bit of the background, what is the Pinecone story? What is-
Lauren Nemeth: You got it. Pinecone’s been around for five years, very well-known for being a great vector database company. In the recent years, we’ve also launched an inference and assistant product all under one mission, which is to make AI knowledgeable. That’s what we come to work doing every day. In terms of the Microsoft partnership, we have long worked with Microsoft in terms of supporting developers on the Azure platform, but we’re super excited about talking about this week is actually more of our native integration into Azure. So everything from unified billing, single sign-on, authentication roles and controls, it’s just going to make a more seamless experience basically for our developers. Pinecone currently has about 5,000 net new developers sign up every single week. And of those, Azure is obviously a critical part of that.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. It seems like you’ve been growing really quick. And so Mike, when I hear her talk about the native integrations, talk a little bit about what’s driving the driving force. Is this becoming more the standard? Is it happening more? How big is, by the way, this ISV ecosystem now that’s really driving this AI evolution?
Mike Hulme: Yeah, it’s great.
Daniel Newman: Revolution, which worked.
Mike Hulme: Absolutely a little bit of both. So we actually offer three really interesting ways that we can work with our ISV partners, like what we have here. So there’s the service integration that we have and that’s great. It offers a good entry point for people to be able to use our technologies together. That’s a little bit of what we’re doing with Weights & Biases this week. Second is what we alluded to right here, which is the Azure Native Integrations, and that’s really a curated program.
We have only 15 ISVs that are brought into that program because we want to make sure that what we’re providing there is really the best-in-class solutions for developers. So what that gives you is native accessibility for developers through the Azure portal, through the CLI and also through our SDK. And we talked about unified billing and management and some other things that make it really easy to access those technologies. That’s really where we’re bringing services that we see that have a ton of developer traction and we bring it right to where the developers are already working, making it really easy for them to use.
Daniel Newman: So you mentioned only 15. Is there some key criteria that’s driving?
Mike Hulme: Yeah, so we obviously look for organizations that have a great amount of market traction. We want to make sure that they get that Microsoft blessing as they come into that. Any developers that’s using that technology knows that they’re getting a real best-in-class technology and one that has a lot of great market traction and stability. We are opening up that program and making it a little bit more of a accessible program. So we do perceive an expansion of that in the future, but we really are selecting how we go out and find those right technologies to work with. The third way that we bring it in is through our application templates. And this is actually something that we just launched. There’s 25 application templates that are available today. These are everything from developer building blocks to solutions that give you the ability to build an application in under five minutes.
And what we’ve done is pre-built in many of our integrations with our partners, Pinecone is one of them, who can actually have a pre-built template. Now you have the flexibility of working with the Pinecone vector database technology. Write in an easy to use developer pre-made template and you can get up and running really quickly if you choose to use the Pinecone solution, you have an option for that. It’s really a great way of making that easy for developers and giving our partners another path to really engage with a broad set of developers using our portfolio.
Daniel Newman: That’s great, Mike. And Lauren, you sort of alluded to this when I asked about the introduction of the partnership, but you have some announcements here, so just being clear. So there’s some new things. So you’ve had this historic partnership, but so just double click for the audience out there. What is new here at Ignite in terms of this partnership with Pinecone and Microsoft?
Lauren Nemeth: Correct. So you could always have been using Azure from a cloud hosting perspective and also licensing our vector database solution. What’s new is now these native integrations. And so I think both in terms of unlocking just the ease of use of unified billing and single sign-on et cetera, but then also to the point of supporting those templates. Reducing developer toil so that when you’re getting set up, you can immediately start configuring your vectors, et cetera, directly into Pinecone. The only other announcement we have as Pinecone that we’re going to be talking more about this week is also our inference product. So this is bringing re-rankers and embedding models a lot closer to the vector database itself, once again under the guise of reducing developer toil, creating more of that innovation under one roof. And so that’s a lot of what we’re going to be talking about this week for Pinecone.
Daniel Newman: I imagine there’s an element of efficiency in all this because of how fast-
Lauren Nemeth: Tremendous efficiency.
Daniel Newman: Right. How fast these developers are expected to move to keep this fresh.
Lauren Nemeth: Yeah. I mean, I think for us, when we started the company five years ago, vector database is like, we’re not new per se. They’ve been around for some time. I think their ease of use and commercial viability was new. ChatGPT obviously came out, the AI wave started, people really using more and more vector search capabilities. And what we’ve now found with a lot of our developers is that they don’t just want the vector search capability set, they want broader support with inference assistant, integrating different models, integrating more deeply into Azure. And so we’re really customizing our roadmap based on what those 5,000 plus developers every week are asking us for.
Daniel Newman: Absolutely. And Chris, can you talk a little bit about the Weights & Biases integrations with Azure?
Chris Van Pelt: Yeah, sure. So this week, we’re announcing our Azure OpenAI fine-tuning integration. So teams that are fine-tuning and OpenAI model can actually see all of those metrics and information about that job tracked directly in the Weights & Biases system of record. And this is really important for teams because they’re often using our tool because they want that central pane of glass. Wherever they’re training their models or the work that they’re doing in their research, they’re able to capture those insights in one place so that the team can continue to iterate and to make these models ultimately better. And the other big announcement is our Azure Native Integration as well. So folks will be able to bring a completely isolated instance of the Weights & Biases platform directly into their Azure VPC and keep all of that data siloed in one specific region or AZ.
Daniel Newman: It sounds like you have a lot of excitement here, a couple of really intense days ahead and hopefully everything’s really, really well-received. Mike, it’s been great to hear from the partners, appreciate Microsoft pulling them together, bringing you all onto The Six Five. We talked about the secret knock a little bit, but it also sounds to me like it’s becoming something based on the demand and the opportunity that there’s a lot of enthusiasm and excitement about. So for those that are maybe out there, ISVs that are out there that are hearing-
Mike Hulme: Absolutely.
Daniel Newman: … and they have a place, talk a little bit about what you recommend. How do they get started? How do they become part of this not so secret, secret club that we’re talking about?
Mike Hulme: Yeah, absolutely. So I love that we have so many great options for people to start looking for how they can partner with us, start to build integrations. The Azure Native Integrations program, it’s great that we’re going to be expanding that program as well and creating a little bit more of an open door for people to bring their solutions. In the end, it’s all about developer experience and really keeping developers in their flow, less context switching, more time saved, using the services that they know and they love. And the flexibility that we’re giving them I think is really a key thing for us. One of the other areas that we like to say is that it’s a two-way street because many of these technologies have great traction with the startup community and the organizations that are really maybe AI native. You can see great examples of those customers within these partners and others, and this is a great way for us to extend there.
That’s a part of our business that’s grown 200% over the last year, and that’s in part to the fact that we have extended out to our partners and brought them in and created channels for both of us to access those customers. Likewise then, we have great opportunities for our partners to reach our enterprise customers and to bring in these great solutions into a broader set of organizations where they can expand their footprint and continue to grow. So it’s really a synergistic program. I’d say to any AI ISV out there, any tool chain provider, this is a great opportunity for us to partner. We can bring in a range of complimentary solutions and new ways that help developers. And if you fit those criteria, then we have some great opportunities to grow your business and grow with us as well.
Daniel Newman: Well, Mike, Lauren, Chris, very exciting times. Thank you all very much for spending some time here and have a great rest of your Ignite and congratulations on all the success, all the progress. Look forward to watching this continue to evolve.
Mike Hulme: Great.
Lauren Nemeth: We appreciate it. Thank you.
Chris Van Pelt: Thanks for your time. Thank you.
Daniel Newman: And thank you so much for tuning into this episode of The Six Five. We are On the Road here at Microsoft Ignite 2024 in Chicago, Illinois for this episode. I got to say goodbye, but hit that subscribe button, be part of our community. We hope to see you all soon. Bye-bye.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
