The News: Oracle announced the general availability of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Generative AI service along with new innovations that can make it easier for enterprises to take advantage of the latest advancements in generative AI. Read the full press release on the Oracle website.
Oracle Generative AI: Advancing the Frontier of Enterprise Innovation
Analyst Take: Oracle swiftly uplifts its generative AI game with the general availability of its OCI Generative AI offering as well as beta offerings of OCI Generative AI Agents and OCI Data Science AI Quick Actions. The new OCI offerings are built to fulfill the primary strategic goal of enterprises to use generative AI to rapidly process relevant data with natural language.
Key details include that OCI Generative AI service is a fully managed service that integrates large language models (LLMs) from Cohere and Meta Llama 2 to address a wide range of business use cases. OCI Generative AI service now includes multilingual capabilities that support over 100 languages, an improved GPU cluster management experience, and flexible fine-tuning options. Customers can use OCI Generative AI service in the Oracle Cloud and on-premises through OCI Dedicated Region.
Today, I see that many enterprises are finding that the pre-training as well as the fine-tuning or continuous training of LLMs are proving expensive and time consuming. With the new release, Oracle is directly addressing the main generative AI challenges that enterprises are confronting. OCI Generative AI brings new features such as flexible fine tuning of both Cohere Command 52/6B models as well as improved cluster UX including multi-endpoint support in hosting clusters and scaling clusters by adding/removing units to handle more model requests.
This approach can spur key generative AI use cases across major business functions such as customer operations, marketing, sales, product development, risk and legal, as well as finance and strategy, further mainstreaming generative AI tools and applications throughout the enterprise organization.
Proliferating the Possibilities of Generative AI Across the Enterprise
On a portfolio-wide basis Oracle is embedding generative AI across every layer on the tech stack that prioritizes data management security and governance in accord with delivering high-performance generative AI . From my view, the Oracle Cloud ecosystem is especially well-suited for driving AI innovation throughout the enterprise realm since it enlists a vast array of portfolio capabilities and qualified partners across the applications (e.g., Fusion, NetSuite), AI services, machine learning (ML) for data platforms (e.g., MySQL HeatWave Vector Store, AI Vector Search in Oracle Database), and AI infrastructure (e.g., OCI Supercluster with RDMA networking, compute bare metal instances and VMs with NVIDIA GPUs).
As such, Oracle can offer enterprises a more streamlined approach to lowering the expense and resource/time commitment to pre-train, fine-tune, and continuously train LLMs on organization knowledge, which I see has proven an obstacle in many of today’s enterprise environments outside some call center and customer experience support applications.
Oracle augments its generative AI proposition through its ability to combine generative AI tools with a diverse array of enterprise applications that AWS and Google are unable to counter directly in-portfolio as well as a cloud database global presence where IBM trails. Plus, I see Oracle offering sharp price performance differentiators against AWS and Google across key cloud database categories that can ease generative AI adoption and scaling in such environments. This reinforces Oracle’s ecosystem credentials in promoting its ability to embed generative AI features and services across every layer of the tech stack that definitively prioritizes data management security and governance in accord with delivering high-performance generative AI . Moreover, the Meta Llama 2 and Cohere relations boost model flexibility in areas such as Llama’s free availability for research and commercial use. Currently, IBM is not listed as a partner of Cohere.
I anticipate that enterprises and their workforces can benefit from OCI Data Science capabilities such as no-code access to a wide and evolving array of LLMs, easing integration with Data Science notebooks, and providing accelerating actions related to deploying, fine tuning, and scaling generative AI applications. Also, Oracle offers supercomputing performance through dedicated AI clusters certified by NVIDIA that are purpose aligned to improve the economics of training models, including scaling up to 4096 instances and 32,768 GPUs easing the support and scaling of AI workloads. Moreover, RDMA networking can assure more efficient processing of AI workloads, further uplifting Oracle’s AI infrastructure credentials.
Integral to the OCI Generative AI proposition are the OCI RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) agents available in beta that act on knowledge bases such as search indexes. For instance, this extends to call transcripts, internal knowledge sources, and other large corpuses of enterprise proprietary data. Upcoming generative AI agents include information retrieval capabilities enabled by agents that connect to customer data sources with beta support for OCI OpenSearch in January 2024. Next, during H1 2024, RAG with Oracle Database 23c AI Vector Search and MySQL HeatWave Vector Store ensure agents can go beyond information retrieval tasks and call APIs on the customer’s behalf with the potential to automate a variety of tedious tasks.
Streamlining the Enterprise AI Experience
Oracle is bringing AI to the enterprise at every layer of its stack encompassing SaaS applications, AI services, the data layer, and infrastructure all supported by qualified partners. Accordingly, Oracle can provide competitive benefits and advantages to the topmost enterprise priorities such as providing customizable models that are engineered specifically for enterprise use cases, embedded generative AI features and services, as well as development and collaboration emphasis on data management.
For data capabilities, Oracle Generative AI is fulfilling the unequivocal enterprise demand for tight control over data security and governance. Oracle’s models are tailored with industry-specific insights to ensure models are fine-tuned to produce superior understanding taking advantage of the AI/ML that is built into its data management platform consisting of Oracle Database, Autonomous Database, and MySQL HeatWave. On SaaS apps, OCI Generative AI is coming to Fusion Applications 24A including Fusion Cloud HCM, Fusion Cloud CX, and Fusion Cloud SCM, highlighting Oracle’s unique ability to align vital enterprise applications with the strategic Generative AI objectives of customers.
Key Takeaway: OCI Makes It RAG Time for Enterprises
From my view, there is RAG and then there is RAG done right. With its latest generative AI innovations, Oracle has delivered RAG the way that enterprises actually want to consume it—by prioritizing data management, security, and governance to help ensure enterprise-grade AI. Enterprises can immediately engage the OCI Gen AI RAG service to act on call transcripts, troves of .PDF statements, internal knowledge sources and extremely large corpuses of proprietary corporate data—while a ReRanker adjusts outputs to best match individual user queries. OCI RAG is now available in beta with OpenSearch and once it becomes available on Oracle Database 23c with AI Vector Search and MySQL HeatWave Vector Store, the competitive advantages that customers can obtain will further transcend the boundaries of competitive offerings.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
