Summer Myatt
Artificial intelligence is the transformative technology of this decade. The effects of recent AI advancements are rippling across all industries and even across the public sector landscape. In a new video interview, Executive Mosaic sat down with Steve Derr of Oracle to learn more about the company’s AI efforts and how they’re helping deliver better capabilities to the government.
Oracle’s GPU Capabilities
According to Steve Derr, vice president of Oracle’s JWCC program management office and Cloud Operations and Engineering, Oracle has a three-pronged approach when it comes to AI. The first portion of the strategy centers around the high performance, cost-effective infrastructure Oracle delivers with its GPU capabilities.
Oracle’s GPU infrastructure leverages RDMA networking to increase the performance, scalability and size of the clusters the company can bring to the government. The GPU infrastructure also notably lowers the cost of training large language models, or LLMs.
“Generically speaking, we can support any large language model running on top of this high performance infrastructure,” said Derr, who chairs Executive Mosaic’s 4×24 Cloud Group, in conversation with Executive Mosaic’s Summer Myatt. “What you can effectively do with that is bring your own AI capability to Oracle Cloud, so we’re not limiting you to a specific model or a specific technology.”
Oracle’s AI Cloud Applications
As part of the second prong of its strategy, Oracle is focused on bringing AI cloud applications such as text, speech, vision and language to market as quickly as possible, said Derr.
“We also have partnerships with companies like Cohere, who run natively on top of Oracle’s cloud, further expanding the portfolio of capabilities that Oracle can bring to market,” the Oracle VP explained.
SaaS Applications & Database Capability
The third component of Oracle’s AI strategy focuses on software-as-a-service applications and the company’s database capability that it has enabled throughout the government.
“Our applications have embedded AI that helps our customers leverage the technology in a simple, easy to access, pre-programmed format to expedite business processes in areas such as human capital management and enterprise resource planning,” said Derr.
With the recent announcement of Oracle Database 23ai, the company has brought to market a “vector capability that works in conjunction with large language models to direct them to specific data sets, which enhances the results provided because they leverage trusted government specific information rather than generic and broad information,” according to Derr.
Oracle is also bringing AI to classified environments through a recently awarded task order designed to accelerate the deployment and security accreditation of these capabilities. Derr said this further expands the company’s cloud capabilities that already exist in the classified environment.
Watch Steve Derr’s video interview for more insights into Oracle’s cloud, AI and zero trust efforts.
