In what Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) president and chief executive officer (CEO) Antonio Neri said is “one of the boldest bets in the history of our company,” today at HPE Discover, the company announced HPE GreenLake for Large Language Models (LLMs), which brings the company into the realm of artificial intelligence (AI) cloud services.
The company said in a release that the new service will offer LLMs for any size company, from startup to enterprise, on demand, in a multi-tenant supercomputing cloud service.
“With the introduction of HPE GreenLake from LLMs, enterprises can privately train, tune, and deploy large-scale AI using a sustainable supercomputing platform that combines HPE’s AI software and market-leading supercomputers,” the release stated, adding that the service will be offered in partnership with German AI startup Aleph Alpha to provide users with a ready-to-use pre-trained LLM, Luminous, to power text and image processing and analysis.
“Luminous was actually trained using HPE supercomputers and HPE’s AI software, and has already been implemented by various organizations in healthcare and financial services, and in the legal profession as a digital assistant,” noted Justin Hotard, executive vice president and general manager, high performance computing and AI at HPE, during a media briefing.
“By enabling on demand access to Luminous, enterprises can also take advantage of one of its multiple languages, which include English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.”
This is the first of a series of planned industry and domain-specific AI applications, he added. Climate modeling, healthcare and life sciences, financial services, manufacturing, and transportation are also in the queue.
“I think this is a once in a lifetime event that we are able to not only live through, but shape – everyone here is able to shape this future that we’re all living in, and enterprises and governments are reinventing themselves to face the challenges that we all will see,” Jonas Andrulis, founder and CEO of Aleph Alpha observed during a fireside chat with Neri. “You mentioned some of them, like worker shortages, but also environmental challenges.
“Generative AI is the beginning of a new era and what a time to be alive. We have seen emerging capabilities of LLM that just a few years ago, we would not have expected. What we are trying to do is bring this capability, these powers into complex and critical environments, like finance, legal, healthcare, government, security, and for those environments you need much more than just a chatbot that throws out an answer. And so this is how we’re combining this technology with the human expert because I truly believe only the human can take responsibility, and we need somebody to take responsibility in these valuable and critical environments.”
Added Chase Lochmiller, founder and CEO of Crusoe Energy, who joined Neri, HPE principal data scientist Iveta Lohovska, and Andrulis on stage for the chat, “I’m most excited about AI because I think it’s going to be a catalyst to usher in a future of abundance for all of humanity and help us solve sort of the biggest, most critical problems that are facing our generation. You know, everything from climate change and developing new energy resources to solving things like food insecurity, transportation, and really up-level the entire human experience and drive forward more human prosperity.”
The initial instance of HPE GreenLake for LLMs will be hosted at QScale, in their Lévis, Québec campus, where HPE is the first anchor tenant. It will be available in the second half of 2023 in North America, with availability expanding to Europe in 2024. HPE selected Canada to host GreenLake for LLMs, it said, because it is committed to sustainable computing, and QScale’s facilities are powered with nearly 100 per cent renewable energy.