Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison outlined how the company is embedding generative AI (GenAI) into its vast portfolio of cloud services, with the aim of helping customers and society at large tackle their most vexing problems.
During his keynote at Oracle CloudWorld, Ellison also announced a slew of new AI-enabled services, including tools for growing food indoors and out, improving healthcare, and automating application development.
Ellison noted that the release last year of version 3.5 of OpenAI’s ChatGPT captured the attention of government leaders and the public alike in a way technological advances rarely do—and for good reason.
“Is this the most important new computer technology ever? Probably. One thing's for certain: We're about to find out,” he said.
Oracle is best positioned among cloud vendors to help companies develop generative AI models, Ellison said, because its Gen2 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) uses ultrafast remote data memory access (RDMA) networking and connects NVIDIA GPUs in huge superclusters that can efficiently train generative AI models
“Is this the most important new computer technology ever? Probably.”
RDMA networking means that “one computer in the network can actually access the memory of another computer without kind of tapping that computer on the shoulder and getting it to interrupt itself,” he said. “So it has the ability to move a lot of data from one computer to another extremely fast, many times faster than conventional networks.”
Ellison noted that OCI’s speed and cost advantages are why vendors such as Cohere, NVIDIA, and X.AI are using it to train their large language models (LLMs). “In the cloud, time is money,” he said. “We are much faster and many times less expensive.”
Ellison noted that generative AI is changing how Oracle itself develops new products.
For example, he said, Oracle will continue supporting older applications using Java if they were written in that programming language, but it will develop new applications using code generated automatically in Oracle APEX by GenAI tools based on developer prompts. “We're not writing it anymore. We're generating that code,” he said. “It fundamentally changes how we build applications, how we run applications. It just changes everything.”
Ellison also noted that the APEX application generator allows for faster application development with smaller development teams, and because the code was generated by GenAI, it helps significantly reduce security flaws. “This is a very big deal,” he said.
The other new capabilities Ellison announced during his Oracle CloudWorld keynote include the following:
Ellison said Oracle intends to help governments, healthcare providers, and food growers revolutionize their respective industries and improve the human condition.
Returning to generative AI, Ellison noted that most technology “does not get the attention of heads of states and heads of government and everyday people and other professionals. It just doesn't.” But when it comes to GenAI, “everyone wants to know what comes next.”
What comes next is a worldwide race to make the best, most economical use of the technology. According to Ellison, Oracle’s customers and partners in the space (including Cohere and NVIDIA) have a head start in terms of speed and cost.
The next phase of human history is about to be written. But just like the outcome of a Hollywood script, we don’t know if it will be written by human writers or by GenAI itself.
Larry Ellison announced AI product enhancements and shared Oracle’s differentiated strategy during his keynote at Oracle CloudWorld.
Learn how Oracle’s strategy aims at the enterprise.
By fine-tuning large language models using specialized data, banks, hospitals, and others are boosting AI's accuracy—without the cost of training from scratch.