AI, the Vector Database & Cohere Coming Fast - Part II

Oracle is partnering with many of the major AI partners with LLMs but has a major partnership with Cohere, one of the prominent leaders in GenAI. Cohere and Oracle also protect the data you use with RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) to improve your results, improve speed with compression, and minimize hallucinations.

They will not share your data with others (careful - some GenAI shares your data with others as they seek to build a better LLM). As stated earlier, Cohere's CEO & co-founder, Aidan Gomez, was one of the co-authors of the original Google Transformers paper that started the acceleration of AI that led to ChatGPT 3.5 speed. Aidan is also among the "25 Leaders" in Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in AI.

The Oracle Database delivers the data & Cohere delivers the GenAI that allows you to "ask" your Database the questions you want answered. Oracle's new Vector Database leverages this fully so that you can access images (that are vectorized - see image) & do SQL queries to query that image data. So basically, in the same way you would query for all employees in Dept=10, you can query all images in the Database to see which vector is the same/similar to any images you enter.

At the 2023 Oracle CloudWorld, Juan Loaiza showed how images of houses can be vectorized & then can be searched for similar vectors (there is also a vector index to make it fast) but with additional metrics such as location, price, and other columns in a given table (images from Juan's presentation are shown here). See the full presentation on YouTube.

The best part is all the advantages of the Oracle database continue to assist you. Oracle's best features are exactly what's needed to run the massive amounts of data & transactions needed for AI success. In-Memory for speed, Partitioned Tables for speed, RAC for availability, Auto-Tuning to ensure the optimizer is working effectively, and indexes are the best ones for the queries that you're running, Data Guard for recoverability, Exadata for speed, Pluggable Databases for different applications & data sets, Oracle security on the Database for "peace of mind," and Oracle Cloud for scaling & speed while the system is running.   Think of all the queries you might add now that you can query images in your current tables. Of course, you can just use the Autonomous Database and let Oracle manage all of this for you. Querying text, images, articles, videos, manuals, voice, and other multimodal data is what Oracle will do best and will do the fastest!

With Oracle's Cerner acquisition, we now have a database & applications company building the AI future into products for the medical world (Larry showed some of these at Cloud World - including robotics). Oracle is about to show you all the best ways to build applications for your business as they build things around & leverage all of that Cerner data to improve Healthcare. Oracle Applications all include machine learning now & soon GenAI. This will help applications accelerate their abilities to be better and more flexible as we use them to build our desired applications. APEX is now the easiest tool to instantly build simple apps for any form factor (phone, laptop...etc). Over 2M+ apps have been built with APEX, and 3,000 are being built every day based on how easy it is to use. In Andy Mendelsohn's session, I saw that Oracle is also building prompts within APEX that will write the code for you (hint: a growing job will definitely be a "prompt engineer" in the future)! One example was: "show me average salaries by job," press "ok," and the query is written or the graph is built depending on your selection. The Autonomous Database is helping DBAs manage increasing numbers of databases, while APEX is allowing developers to develop applications faster while hitting a level of development speed that nobody is sure of now that this AI will be included in the next APEX. Welcome to the Future! Ensure you leverage AI fully because there will be others that surely will.

DBAs & Developers now have many choices in the jobs of the future:

• Assist in Machine Learning to help the Data Scientist get better data (ML DBA)
• Dive into Machine Learning & start to leverage algorithms for the business (Data Scientist)
• Stay an administration DBA (DBA) & Implement the Vector DB & AI
• Integrate things like VR/AR/GPS to enhance sales, security, or delivery (Emerging Technology)
• Build AI chatbots (Oracle showed how easy it is to do this by leveraging your own Manuals
• Integrate Robotics (Build the future)
• Move into Management (Manage the team that does the above tasks)

The economic potential of Data & GenAI is staggering (not the McKinsey image). Are you leveraging your data effectively?

Applications like financials are critical at times; other times, custom applications, like an APEX app for a phone, take the front seat for customer use, but administration & security never gets to rest. The Autonomous Database has offered to give the DBA a digital twin to assist you (creates and puts a patch on before you even know you need one). Projects with a good DBA are at the top of the success list, and not having a DBA on the project usually puts your project at the bottom. Other reasons for failure also include: Bad Data / Not Enough Data / Missing Data...etc.). With the advent of ML & additional AI, such as robotics, VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), GPS integration, etc., the DBA is more crucial than ever. One thing is for certain: Data & the Database are your keys to success. Note the image that shows the economic potential of GenAI. What are you doing with all of your data? Using this data for RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) will make your AI faster, and the positive effect on your company's value may also grow!

Lastly, there is a lot of Coopetition (Cooperation with Partners & Competition with those same partners). These partnerships are almost always a good thing when the partners are good. Oracle is cooperating with Microsoft in the Cloud (co-location/connection) and Vector Database Cooperation with Cohere in GenAI and LLMs that compete with others. Now, Oracle could use any third-party AI to leverage the #1 database (like ChatGPT or Bard in this article); those partners are coming. Ensure you also have a great partner like Viscosity to help you navigate the challenging & fast-paced world of AI.

References:

• DBAs Next Great Job (presentation), Rich Niemiec
• Larry Ellison Keynote at CloudWorld 2023
• Juan Loaza Keynote at CloudWorld 2023
• Oracle 23c; Oracle CloudWorld, Andrew Mendelsohn
• Preparing for Oracle 23c, Rich Niemiec
• Oracle12c Release 2 Performance Tuning Tips & Techniques; Richard J. Niemiec; Oracle Press
• The Economic Potential of GenAI, McKinsey (from Oracle presentation)
• viscosityna.com, www.oracle.com, & technet.oracle.com
• The State of Generative AI with Dr. Bryan Catanzaro, YouTube
• All companies and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of the respective owners
• Rich Niemiec ©2023. This document cannot be reproduced without expressed written consent from Rich Niemiec or Viscosity NA but may be reproduced or copied for article, presentation, and conference use by the author.
• Neither Viscosity nor the author guarantees this document to be error-free. Please provide comments/questions to richniemiec@gmail.com – niemiec@viscosityna.com; I am always looking to improve!