Snowflake previews AI-powered functions at Snowday 2023

At its Snowday 2023 event, data cloud company, Snowflake, previewed its upcoming Snowflake Cortex, a generative AI service that, the company says, enables users to more easily discover, analyze and build AI apps in the data cloud.

Snowflake Cortex offers serverless functions that include large language models (LLMs), task-specific models and advanced vector search functionality. According to Snowflake, these building block functions enable users to build LLM-powered apps, without the need for AI expertise or complex GPU-based infrastructure management. Instead, any user can analyze data or build AI apps with a function call in SQL or Python code.

Specialized Functions, for example, are a set of task-specific functions that can detect sentiment, extract an answer, summarize the text and translate it to a selected language, for any given input text. Specialized functions also include Snowflake’s existing machine learning-powered functions, including forecasting, anomaly detection, contribution explorer and classification.

General-Purpose Functions are a set of conversational functions that employ open source LLMs, like the Llama 2 model, and Snowflake LLMs that includes a text-to-SQL model so users can “chat” with their data. These functions also include vector embedding and search functionality, so users can contextualize the model responses with their data.

Snowflake also unveiled, a set of Snowflake developed user interfaces and LLMs fully hosted and managed by Snowflake Cortex. These include:

Snowflake Copilot: an LLM-powered assistant that lets users ask questions of their data in plain text, write SQL queries against relevant data sets, refine queries and filter insights.

Universal Search: LLM-powered search function that will search across a customer’s Snowflake account, including databases, views and Iceberg Tables.
.
Document AI: An LLM-powered function that can extract content, such as invoice amounts or contractual terms, from documents and fine-tune results using a visual interface and natural language.

“Snowflake is helping pioneer the next wave of AI innovation by providing enterprises with the data foundation and cutting-edge AI building blocks they need to create powerful AI and machine learning apps while keeping their data safe and governed,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, SVP of AI, Snowflake. “With Snowflake Cortex, businesses can now tap into the power of large language models in seconds, build custom LLM-powered apps within minutes, and maintain flexibility and control over their data.”
www.snowflake.com