GEC NEWS WIREIn 2023, the tech industry witnessed a paradigm shift with the VAST Data Platform’s groundbreaking launch, marking a transformative step towards AI-assisted discovery. This innovative data platform emerged as the cornerstone for organizations seeking high-performance, environmentally conscious, and sustainable solutions.
One notable event or development in the world of tech recently has been the growing popularity of ChatGPT, Large Language Models (LLMs), and other generative AI applications. This exponential rise of generative AI and apps like ChatGPT can be attributed towards their ability to create new or original content with a set of well-placed prompts. Due to years of development and experimentation, genAI carries countless opportunities and applications to generate content, synthesize data and automate complex tasks. That’s what makes this technology that much more exciting.
As an extension of this AI explosion, it became imperative to provide these applications to large amounts of data which would become their basis for their model training, content generation or problem-solving. These applications required access to structured data and that too without lag, in a timely manner. This necessitated the need for a data platform that would assist these applications to find easy and cost-effective ways to store and access large amounts of data, and bring structure to unstructured data. The true potential of AI can be realized when machines can capture, synthesize, and learn from data to achieve a level of specialization in a matter of days rather than decades.
Generative AI’s Soaring Popularity and the Need for Data Platforms
AI has completely transformed the tech industry. While generative AI and LLMs have introduced the world to AI, they are limited to performing routine tasks. While AI is becoming good in performing human tasks and reshaping work processes, its primary influence lies in augmenting and complementing human abilities rather than displacing them. This intelligent technology is poised to boost our analytical and decision-making skills while fostering creativity.
By taking advantage of a true, AI-automated discovery platform, organizations can leverage their proprietary data sets to deliver immense value to their customers and in turn, differentiate their businesses – fostering global collaboration and upskilling their workforce to utilize AI tools effectively and contribute to AI-driven transformations.
AI’s Transformative Impact on the Tech Industry
Generative AI took center stage in 2023 and had all the hallmarks of a breakthrough year with businesses jumping into what has been referred to as one of the major tech trends in recent years. Looking ahead to 2024, this momentum is expected to persist and innovate.
Despite the buzz surrounding generative AI, its practical deployment in enterprises remains in the nascent stages. The coming year anticipates a surge in adoption and investment, driven by organizations recognizing their unpreparedness to handle AI and deep learning workloads with traditional infrastructure. In addition to that, concerns about inefficient GPU utilization and power constraints are expected to propel further investment as enterprises seek to optimize their significant GPU resources
Anticipated Trends and Expansion Plans in 2024
The AI landscape is set for intentional growth, shifting from genAI experimentation to strategic initiatives. As per the July 2023 AI Pulse Survey, 67% of enterprises are incorporating genAI into their broader AI strategy, signaling a move towards intentional AI adoption. Notably, 70% of enterprises are exploring genAI under technology organization leadership, marking a shift from traditional data science practices.
A recent report by Forrester spotlighted the anticipated trends including the rise of shadow AI (60% of workers using personal AI), increased adoption of open source models (85% of enterprises), and the emergence of AI risk hallucination policies, offering coverage for unique challenges in genAI-related risks.
In a nutshell, the year ahead promises intentional and integrational AI growth, led by innovative approaches to managing AI-related risks.
Tech Sector’s Commitment to Sustainability in 2023
The VAST Data Platform sets the foundation for an environmentally conscious, high-performance data center. We face a unique challenge where demands for data is growing year on year, while there is also a growing emphasis on adopting sustainable business practices. But by deploying the right infrastructure, we can deliver the right combination of low-power, efficient performance and compelling economics.
Comparing VAST’s Data Platform to legacy hybrid systems, we can cut electricity consumption by nearly 400,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, eliminating approximately 283 metric tons of annual CO2 production per 5PB deployed.
Contributions to Global Challenges and Sustainability
VAST DATA contributed to address world challenges by enabling various customers and partners to develop innovative and impactful applications that leveraged AI, big data, and cloud computing. Some of the examples of these applications were treatments for disease and cancers, forge new paths to tackle climate change, pioneer revolutionary approaches to agriculture, and uncover new fields of science and mathematics that the world has not yet even considered. We also published our first Sustainability Report, which demonstrated how our platform achieved industry-best power consumption, minimized e-waste, delivered up to 90% energy cost savings, and improved compute efficiency. We backed our report with a Sustainability Guarantee, which pledged to buy carbon offsets if other arrays beat our power efficiency.
AI can help industries find treatments for disease and cancers, forge new paths to tackle climate change, pioneer revolutionary approaches to agriculture, and uncover new fields of science and mathematics that the world has not yet even considered.
Cybersecurity and Data Privacy Measures
Cybersecurity is a big challenge for the industry and we are proud of VAST’s commitment to provide a reliable secure platform. Data platforms should be designed to meet the strict security standards of highly regulated industries like the public sector, healthcare, and finance. The VAST DataStore meets the requirements for immutability and audibility in SEC rules 17a-4(f), 18a-6(e), FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) Rule 4511(c) and CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) rule 1.31(c)-(d).
Our approach to compliance involves implementing a combination of security and management strategies, such as a Zero Trust model. And with every release, we introduce new features and improvements that enhance the security of the product and make it easier for security teams to manage.
Cyber threats such as ransomware has made having a back up system critical for continuity. And since ‘time is money’, having all-flash data protection is necessity. To limit the impact of encrypted or stolen data, organisations must be able to recover data in real time.
To mitigate the costs of slow recoveries, it’s crucial to have a strategy that ensures fast and reliable recovery times and that means having a data platform that can grow infinitely in capacity and performance independently. This ensures that if recovery performance needs to be guaranteed it will not be a trade-off for islands of stranded capacity that results from either dual controller or share nothing scale-out architectures.
Standout Product Launch: The VAST Data Platform
We recently launched the VAST Data Platform, a transformative data platform designed to be the foundation of AI-assisted discovery. The VAST Data Platform is built for deep learning AI that unifies storage, database and virtualized compute engine services in a scalable system.
The VAST Data Platform was built with the entire data spectrum of natural data in mind – unstructured and structured data types in the form of video, imagery, free text, data streams and instrument data – generated from all over the world and processed against an entire global data corpus in real-time. This approach aims to close the gap between event-driven and data-driven architectures by providing the ability to:
- Access and process data in any private or major public cloud data center from a single global namespace
- Understand natural data by embedding a queryable semantic layer into the data itself.
- Continuously and recursively compute data in real time, evolving with each interaction.
In summary, 2023 marked a turning point in the tech industry, characterized by the rise of generative AI, sustainability efforts, intentional AI growth, and innovative product launches. The VAST Data Platform stood out as a symbol of progress, addressing global challenges and contributing to a future where technology seamlessly integrates with environmental responsibility and societal needs.
