Oracle co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison said that generative artificial intelligence has been an opportunity for his company, highlighting a supercomputer his company is building with Nvidia and Oracle AI use cases in health care and software development.
“Generative AI is a revolution,” Ellison said during his keynote address at Oracle’s annual CloudWorld event. “It is a breakthrough. It’s transformational. It’s fundamentally changing things at Oracle. … This makes AI central to almost everything we’re doing.”
Customers are clamoring for GenAI because of the security benefits from removing humans from processes, Ellison said. But he predicts that not many customers will want foundational, large language models like those made by ChatGPT creator OpenAI, backed by Oracle rival Microsoft.
[RELATED: Oracle Q1 Earnings: CTO Ellison Calls GenAI ‘A Boon’ To Database Business]
Oracle’s Ellison Talks GenAI
“They want to take these standard foundational AI models then you want to specialize them for law,” Ellison said. “Or for medicine. Or for some other field. They want to use their own training data to specialize this. And the way you do that, the best way to do that, is to put that supplemental training data in an Oracle vector database. And that’s what we built. Because we can move that data into the training machines faster than anybody.”
CloudWorld 2023 runs through Thursday in Las Vegas.
Ellison called the supercomputer Oracle is building with Nvidia “the largest scientific computer ever built in the history of the earth.” In software development, the ability to produce code with Oracle application Apex means Oracle developers won’t handwrite apps moving forward.
“If we’re starting a brand new project, we’re generating that code. We’re not writing it. We’re not handwriting it anymore,” he said.
And in health care, Ellison said that doctors will turn to GenAI for writing drafts of orders and discharge notes – emphasizing that the AI does not take over the doctor’s job. “The model is making the doctor’s job easier,” he said.
Like other GenAI vendors, Oracle has emphasized data privacy when training AI models.
Salesforce co-founder and CEO and one-time Oracle employee Marc Benioff even railed against other AI vendors during a keynote address this month.
“In the Oracle Cloud, your training data, you can train and specialize a private model with your private data that remains private after training,” Ellison said. “And we’ve done that for software companies, financial services companies, medical companies.”
And Ellison is pushing for more adoption of Oracle Autonomous Database by customers and internally. More automation won’t result in layoffs, however, Ellison said – bringing to mind comments made by IBM CEO Arvind Krishna earlier this year.
“A small percentage of Oracle databases in the world are our new Autonomous Database,” Ellison said. “That’s going to change. It’s going to become a much larger percentage. … Even inside of Oracle. It wasn’t used by Fusion. It wasn’t used by NetSuite. That’s all changing. All of our new applications are starting with the Oracle Autonomous Database.”
Ellison continued: “Does that mean we’re going to have massive layoffs here at Oracle? No, we’re too ambitious for that. What we are is going to try to do a lot more.”
Here’s more of what Oracle’s co-founder had to say during CloudWorld 2023.
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Wade Tyler Millward is an associate editor covering cloud computing and the channel partner programs of Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat, Oracle, Salesforce, Citrix and other cloud vendors. He can be reached at [email protected].
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