insideAI News Latest News – 4/18/2023

In this regular column, we’ll bring you all the latest industry news centered around our main topics of focus: big data, data science, machine learning, AI, and deep learning. Our industry is constantly accelerating with new products and services being announced everyday. Fortunately, we’re in close touch with vendors from this vast ecosystem, so we’re in a unique position to inform you about all that’s new and exciting. Our massive industry database is growing all the time so stay tuned for the latest news items describing technology that may make you and your organization more competitive.

Sigma Computing Launches Enhanced Input Tables, Enabling Users to Write Directly to the Cloud Data Warehouse

Sigma Computing, the alternative to traditional business intelligence (BI), announced the launch of Input Tables, a first-of-its-kind feature that allows Sigma users to add data directly to the warehouse. With Input Tables, technical and business users can build scenarios, augment existing models, and comment and collaborate at cloud scale. Input Tables enables enterprises to migrate all of their analytics and data-driven work to the cloud, eliminating the legacy risks and constraints created by data extracts to spreadsheets.

Sigma remains the only product designed for cloud data warehouses to enable users to freely analyze that data by using a familiar spreadsheet-like interface. With Input Tables, users can now build live scenario models by copying data from their stale, local spreadsheets and turning them into first-class data tables. They can also comment directly into tables, adding a human perspective to data sourced from applications. What that means is a whole new level of predictive analysis is possible. We’re no longer using data only to look at the past, but the real-time present as well as the future.  

“Sigma is again first to market with features that bring more users to the cloud data warehouse. With Input Tables, enterprises can expect business and technical users alike to migrate offline workflows to the cloud, ensuring better scale, better collaboration, better governance and, most critically, better decisions based on live data,” said Mike Palmer, CEO of Sigma Computing. “Input Tables enable all users to retain the speed and flexibility of their local applications with the scale, diversity, and security of the cloud. Leaders can expect transparency, speed and accuracy as business processes and decisions move online.” 

Speechmatics to launch pioneering real-time speech translation capabilities in 69 language pairs

Speechmatics, a leading speech recognition technology scaleup, unveiled plans to amplify its real-time transcription capabilities by providing real-time speech translation in an all-in-one API. Breaking down language barriers enables more people to consume content regardless of industry and unlocks the ability to automatically translate live content from multiple regions. This combined offering enables customers to use the world’s most accurate speech-to-text engine and translate speech for 69 language pairs.

Damir Derd, Head of Sales Engineering at Speechmatics, said, “This is a landmark development for speech recognition technology, and we are proud to remain at the forefront of innovation, demonstrating the commitment to our mission to understand every voice. This new offering opens up a truly global market for our customers with almost instant translation from the spoken word. As demand from viewers in different regions increases for TV shows and broadcast, sports, events, podcasts, game streaming, YouTube and social media videos, the need for captioned videos in multiple languages has too. We are excited to launch this capability to our customers in the next few weeks and will be continuing to work towards adding even more languages and enabling the engine to translate between languages, so the default isn’t always English.” 

Broadcom Unveils Industry’s Highest Performance Fabric for AI Networks

Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ:AVGO) announced that it has delivered Jericho3-AI, enabling the industry’s highest performance fabric for artificial intelligence (AI) networks. Jericho3-AI revolutionizes AI networking with best-in-class capabilities such as perfect load balancing, congestion-free operation, ultra-high radix, and Zero-Impact Failover, all culminating in significantly shorter job completion times for any AI workload.

“The benchmark for AI networking is reducing the time and effort it takes to complete the training and inference of large-scale AI models,” said Ram Velaga, senior vice president and general manager, Core Switching Group, Broadcom. “Jericho3-AI delivers significant reduction in job completion time compared to any other alternative in the market.”

Centific Launches Honeybee, a Multipurpose AI Solution

Centific, a world-class digital solutions provider announced the launch of Honeybee, a toolkit that supports multipurpose AI systems that perform a wide range of tasks such as supporting localization of content. Additionally, Honeybee helps reduce localization costs by performing essential duties such as evaluating machine translation accuracy, making language-based and localization tasks up to 50% more efficient.

As more businesses leverage large language models (LLMs) to train AI using massive amounts of data to understand, evaluate, classify and generate human language, Honeybee finetunes LLMs to make the process faster and more effective. To ensure Honeybee applies LLMs responsibly, Centific uses a human-in-the-loop approach, with people performing crucial roles such as evaluating the model, ensuring human alignment and de-biasing the model.

“Honeybee advances AI by giving businesses a useful toolkit for practical applications such as localizing high volumes of complex content,” said Venkat Rangapuram, CEO, Centific. “Multipurpose AI is revolutionizing many industries by performing more complicated tasks, and Centific is already helping clients reap the benefits.”

H2O.ai Brings H2O AI Cloud to the Snowflake Manufacturing Data Cloud

H2O.ai announced the launch of H2O AI Cloud as a pre-built solution for the Manufacturing Data Cloud, launched by Snowflake, the Data Cloud company. The Manufacturing Data Cloud enables companies in automotive, technology, energy, and industrial sectors to unlock the value of their critical siloed industrial data by leveraging Snowflake’s data platform, Snowflake- and partner-delivered solutions, and industry-specific datasets. The Manufacturing Data Cloud empowers manufacturers to collaborate with partners, suppliers, and customers in a secure and scalable way, driving greater agility and visibility across the entire value chain. 

“Snowflake’s partnership with H2O.ai is part of the greater effort to give our manufacturing customers and their suppliers access to the data, applications, and services needed to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance supply chain transparency,” said Tim Long, Global Head of Manufacturing at Snowflake. “We look forward to working closely with H2O.ai to help the industry continue to embrace the increasingly digital-industrial world.” 

Fiberplane’s New Autometrics Puts Observability Metrics in Developers’s Hands, Unlocks New Level of Insight in Production 

Fiberplane, the real-time collaboration notebook specifically designed for developers and DevOps teams to debug their infrastructure, announced Autometrics, a powerful set of open source libraries that enables developers to take advantage of an underutilized but powerful tool in the observability stack – metrics.

“Metrics are underused today relative to their power and cost effectiveness because they have a developer experience problem. To make use of metrics, developers need to think about what to track, how to track it, how to query the data once they have it, and how to operationalize the data with alerts and dashboards,” said Micha “mies” Hernandez van Leuffen, founder and CEO of Fiberplane. “Fiberplane’s new Autometrics addresses many of these developer experience problem, ultimately making it easier for them to understand how their code is performing in production.” 

Ontotext GraphDB Passes the Linked Data Benchmarking Council’s Social Network and the Semantic Publishing Benchmarks

Ontotext, a leading global provider of enterprise knowledge graph (EKG) technology and semantic database engines, announced that Ontotext GraphDBтм is the first engine to pass both Linked Data Benchmarking Council’s (LDBC) Social Network Benchmark (SNB) and Semantic Publishing Benchmarks (SPB), proving its unique capability to handle graph analytics and metadata management workloads simultaneously. The results from the LDBC – a non-profit organization defining standard graph benchmarks to foster a community around graph processing technologies – found Ontotext GraphDB to be the most versatile Graph Database Engine allowing data from different sources to be interlinked, contextualized, and normalized in a graph that allows for consistent and unambiguous interpretation.

“Our mission is to offer our users an enterprise-ready database delivering stable performance across different graph use cases. Passing external benchmark audits with a generally available version reflects our transparent engineering culture of being an advisor to our clients,” said Vassil Momtchev, CTO, at Ontotext. “In both benchmarks, the engine scales with the complex read and write operations load while preserving its ACID compliance and graph consistency.”

Aiven launches free plans for PostgreSQL®, MySQL, and Redis® to boost open source adoption and make its platform more accessible

Aiven, the open source cloud data platform, announced the launch of free plans for its open source database services, Aiven for PostgreSQL®, Aiven for MySQL, and Aiven for Redis®. These free plans are available to anyone with technical support through a newly launched community forum.

“By making our portfolio of open source tools that our customers love accessible to all, we’re enabling the next generation of developers to begin learning and expanding their skill set without having to endure the traditionally high costs,” said Oskari Saarenmaa, Co-Founder and CEO of Aiven. “Providing access to these free plans is another step in realizing Aiven’s vision of democratizing open source technologies, making them available to everyone and reinforcing our commitment to the open source community.”

PagerDuty AIOps Harnesses the Power of AI, Built-in Automation, and the Company’s  Foundational Data Model to Transform Modern Operations for the Enterprise

PagerDuty, Inc. (NYSE:PD), a global leader in digital operations management, announced the general availability of PagerDuty AIOps, a solution that delivers end-to-end automation, from event ingestion through auto-remediation, to reliably process high volumes of data and events and resolve incidents quickly. PagerDuty AIOps leverages machine learning (ML) and proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize PagerDuty’s foundational data model, reducing complexity, automating more of the incident response process, and preventing costly incidents. 

“PagerDuty AIOps is a game-changing solution, delivering fast time-to-value for our early access customers and eliminating the need for difficult- and expensive-to-implement event management tools and AIOps offerings of the previous generation,” said Jennifer Tejada, CEO and Chairperson at PagerDuty. “PagerDuty AIOps is deeply integrated into our Operations Cloud platform, including our 700-strong integrations across our ecosystem. Our customers can reduce their cost of operations, mitigate business risk, and improve productivity, allowing them to focus their time on growth and innovation.”

Kyligence Announces the General Availability of its Intelligent Metrics Platform

Kyligence announced the general availability of Kyligence Zen, a Metrics Platform that centralizes all types of metrics into a unified catalog system. With Kyligence Zen, users can build a common data language across an entire organization for trusted and consistent key metrics. It is a comprehensive all-in-one solution that simplifies the management of metrics and lowers costs by using a single platform.

“Organizations struggle with inconsistent metrics, which impacts trust and slows down decision making,” said Luke Han, co-founder and CEO, Kyligence. “Kyligence Zen provides a new way to build a single source of truth based on a metrics catalog and introduces AI-augmented capabilities to automate data processing, modeling and insights.”

Introducing hila, the Generative AI-Powered Researcher for Investors 

Vianai Systems, provider of human-centered AI platforms and products, unveiled hila, the first AI-powered chat assistant for institutional and retail investors, investment banking analysts, and other investment professionals. 

hila was built from the ground up with a zero-tolerance approach to hallucinations that are prevalent in many generative-AI chat tools today, and unlike recently announced GPT chat tools for finance, hila is free to users as part of the research phase – and today, thousands of users, many from the most well-known financial institutions in the world, are already using the system extensively.

“To converse means to be familiar with – an inherent trust in the interaction itself. As we develop conversational AI for enterprise applications, creating familiarity and trust is critical, and guardrails for safety and reliability are essential. Our product hila enables investors to ask great questions, accelerate insights, and make informed decisions, while providing precise answers that users can verify. The future of research is interactive, curiosity-driven, and reliable, and I am proud of our team’s work in creating hila as an example of human-centered conversational AI,” said Dr. Vishal Sikka, Founder and CEO of Vianai Systems. 

Mozart Data Launches Sonata To Prioritize Data from Day One – for Free 

Mozart Data, the all-in-one modern data platform, announced the launch of Sonata, a free version of the Mozart product. Empowering small to midsize businesses across all industries, Sonata offers unmatched data analytics capabilities, without any need for financial commitment, technical expertise, or engineering resources. Onboarding takes less than an hour and anyone from a finance team member to a business development executive to a CEO can begin building dashboards, centralizing data, and searching for key insights. 

“We fundamentally believe that companies should prioritize data from the outset, much earlier in their journey than most do. I understand the resource barriers that have historically made this difficult, and we started Mozart Data to remove those,” said Peter Fishman, Co-Founder and CEO of Mozart Data. “You no longer need a large data team or a big upfront monetary investment to have a data warehouse and start working with your data in a repeatable way.” 

OtterTune Launches Version 2.0 of Automated Cloud Database Tuning Service

OtterTune, a leading provider of AI-powered database tuning software, announced the version v2.0 release of its next-generation platform. This latest release of the company’s flagship product provides even more advanced automation and optimization capabilities, helping organizations of all sizes improve the performance and efficiency of their cloud databases without the need for human expertise. OtterTune’s proprietary technology uses machine learning algorithms that continuously monitor and analyze database workloads in real time, identifying opportunities to optimize performance and reduce cost.

“We are elated to be launching OtterTune v2.0 and bringing the power of our automated database tuning to more people,” said Andy Pavlo, co-founder and CEO of OtterTune. “Our service has already helped many companies get their databases running like an expensive DBA. But this new version goes beyond that and gives people peace of mind about their databases no matter how their application needs evolve.”

Sinequa Brings the Power of ChatGPT to the Enterprise by Combining its Neural Search Engine with Generative Large Language Models

Enterprise Search leader Sinequa announced the integration of Microsoft Azure Open AI Service into its Neural Search capabilities, putting enterprise knowledge to work like never before by combining unmatched relevance with sharp summaries and a conversational interface. This first-to-market innovation is designed to help users obtain and interact with information faster and more naturally.

Sinequa’s solution brings the power of generative AI to the workplace by pairing two powerful technologies to work together – the unmatched relevance of Sinequa’s Neural search platform and the summarization and interactivity of generative AI. This combination is key, as it provides the only way to unleash the power of generative LLMs to the enterprise safely, powering the chat with secure enterprise content thanks to Sinequa’s extensive connectivity to all enterprise sources.

Alexandre Bilger Co-CEO at Sinequa, explained further: “The rapid emergence of ChatGPT in recent months has caused business leaders to ask how generative large language models (LLMs) can accelerate innovation and increase productivity. Combining the unmatched accuracy and relevance of Sinequa’s Neural Search with the natural language interface and answering capabilities of ChatGPT creates a powerful and first-to-market synergy that enables your employees to converse with your content”.

MariaDB’s New SkySQL Release Reimagines How Companies Control Cloud Database Spend

MariaDB plc (NYSE: MRDB) announced the immediate availability of a new release of MariaDB SkySQL, a second generation cloud database service. SkySQL offers fully managed databases including its flagship distributed SQL product MariaDB Xpand for maximum resilience and scalability.

The release brings new innovation that lets organizations better manage their cloud database costs. SkySQL now enables autoscaling, which scales resources when demand surges and back down when demand normalizes to save costs. SkySQL also introduces serverless analytics to uncover insights on all current data without the need for ETL and all while paying for only what is used.

Cloud database services offered by public cloud vendors were the first to bring open source databases, such as MariaDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL, to the cloud over a decade ago. These first generation cloud databases emphasized convenience and price, however, today’s world requires extraordinary resilience, elasticity and performance. Accelerated by the pandemic, at an unprecedented level, people have come to expect more from the services and applications they rely on every day – whether it’s travel related, buying tickets to a concert, banking and more. Second generation cloud database services combine deep database expertise and cloud-native technology to run across clouds and achieve unstoppable performance.

“At our heart, we are a database company,” said Jags Ramnarayan, SVP and SkySQL general manager at MariaDB plc. “We take that deep-rooted experience and knowledge to offer a cloud database service that is tuned and optimized for the most rigorous of situations. SkySQL brings hard-hitting capabilities such as distributed SQL with our Xpand database and we make it incredibly easy to operate, monitor, run analytics and scale elastically, all while being able to control your cloud spend. With other clouds, costs tend to only go one way, up. With SkySQL, we also let you shrink the cost footprint automatically when demand is low. For everyone looking for exceptional scalability and performance of MariaDB databases in the cloud, MariaDB SkySQL is the solution.”

Digitate Boosts its SaaS-only Platform with New Multi-Cloud Offerings and Expands AI Capabilities for IT and Business Operations

Digitate, a leading provider of SaaS-based enterprise software for IT and business operations, unveiled the general availability of its latest release to help advance more agile and resilient digital enterprises. With artificial intelligence (AI) at its core, Digitate expands its integrated SaaS-based AIOPs platform with closed-loop automation, advanced observability, and a single-pane cloud management console that gives organizations a comprehensive, unified software suite to simplify their operations and increase business velocity. 

The new release – Eagle – advances AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities across the entire ignio™ product line, solving key business challenges with better enterprise risk management, intelligent patching and compliance, automation of advanced SAP operations, and streamlined change management process. The Eagle release also simplifies the overall user experience with customizable dashboards, proactive health checks, and centralized control with increased visibility for faster isolation and remediation of issues that have proven to cause enterprise-wide disruptions.  

“Our core belief is that an autonomous enterprise driving agility and resiliency through predictability and intelligence is critical in delivering business outcomes and providing an unrivaled customer experience. This new release is advancing the autonomous enterprise by equipping our customers with an integrated SaaS platform that increases digital resiliency through advanced AI and analytics as well as better visibility across the tech stack,” said Akhilesh Tripathi, CEO of Digitate. “This latest release also expands our multi-cloud offerings to deliver seamless cloud operations with improved security and compliance, enabling customers to manage complex multi-cloud environments with greater consistency and resilience.” 

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Comments

  1. I’m really impressed with the new tech being developed. It’s incredible to think about all the possibilities and how it will change our lives.