Announced during its Snow Day 2023 event, Snowflake unveiled several innovations, enhancements and investment plans to improve user experience and extend new capabilities to organizations.
An announcement saw the unveiling of Snowflake Cortex (private preview), a fully managed service that allows organizations to easily discover, analyze and build AI applications in the Data Cloud.
Snowflake Cortex provides users with instant access to a growing set of serverless features that include cutting-edge LLMs such as Meta AI’s Llama 2 model, task-specific models, and advanced vector search functionality. With them, teams have the promise of accelerating their analyzes and creating contextualized LLM-based applications in minutes.
Additionally, Snowflake has also created three LLM-based experiences leveraging Snowflake Cortex to improve user productivity, including Document AI, Snowflake Copilot, and Universal Search.
“Snowflake is helping usher in the next wave of AI innovation by providing businesses with the cutting-edge AI database and building blocks they need to build powerful AI and intelligence applications. machine learning while keeping their data secure and governed,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, SVP of Snowflake AI.
“With Snowflake Cortex, businesses can now harness the power of large language models in seconds, build custom LLM-based applications in minutes, and maintain flexibility and control over their data – while reimagining how all Users leverage generative AI to deliver business value. »
Snowflake enhances its Python capabilities through Snowpark to improve productivity, increase collaboration, and accelerate end-to-end AI and ML workflows. With support for containerized workloads and expanded DevOps capabilities, developers can accelerate development and run applications within Snowflake’s fully managed infrastructure.
New enhancements include Snowflake Notebooks, the Snowpark ML Modeling API, and Snowpark ML Operations enhancements that leverage a native Snowflake model entity and enable deployment and management of models in Snowflake.
Additionally, as announced at Snowday 2023, new enhancements will provide Snowflake customers with ways to eliminate silos and integrate AI and application development directly into their business data. These announcements aim to enable organizations to unify all their data into a single database, secured by a powerful governance model.
Christian Kleinerman, Senior Vice President of Product at Snowflake, said: “Having a strong database is key to a successful AI strategy, and Snowflake’s latest innovations ensure our customers have the ability to ‘harness data and exploit emerging technologies in a secure and governed manner.
“Snowflake makes it easier for users to leverage all their data, without data silos or compromises, so they can build powerful AI models and applications that transform their industries. »
Finally, the company announced plans to invest up to $100 million in the next generation of early-stage startups building Snowflake native applications. The Powered by Snowflake funding program brings together leading venture capital firms Altimeter Capital, Amplify Partners, Anthos Capital, Coatue, ICONIQ Growth, IVP, Madrona, Menlo Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and Snowflake Ventures.
As part of the Powered by Snowflake funding program, AWS will fuel growth and innovation by providing approximately $1 million in free Snowflake credits on AWS over four years to startups building Snowflake-native applications.