Year ahead generative AI - Focus will now shift to inference

Year ahead generative AI : Focus will now shift to inference

By Alok Ohrie

The year 2023 turned out to be  annus mirabilis for its impact on business and society owing to the dizzying pace of development in digital technologies and the fastest adoption curve by industry over the past few months. The phenomenal rise of AI, abundantly complemented by serviceable computing power has persuaded organisations to advance from proof-of-concept to greater adoption of IT as a top-down business strategy for productivity gains. The new year will see a culmination of radical advancements in multicloud, edge computing, open ecosystems and generative AI (GenAI).Data-intensive technologies that can automate intelligent decisions and unlock true value necessitate adaptive, on-demand computing power and storage. Recent months have seen a strong shift towards multicloud strategy, with 87% of organisations surveyed reporting adoption.Worldwide spending on cloud computing infrastructure is expected to cross $1 trillion in 2024. GenAI, notably, has emerged as a powerful technology in the business world, with 2023 being called its breakout year by McKinsey. With its ability to produce new and original content such as images, speech, text, software code, and product designs, GenAI will completely transform roles and boost performance across functions such as sales and marketing, customer operations and software development, unlocking trillions of dollars in value across sectors. We are tracking more than 100 diverse AI accelerators in development and expect demand in 2024 to drive production of DPUs, FPGAs, neuromorphic and quantum computing chips, bolstered by architectural and silicon innovation that aim for sustainable IT to reduce energy consumption.Open ecosystems will be another pivotal development in the GenAI landscape. The release of open-source AI models such as LLaMA and Stable Diffusion has democratised the immense power of AI to be more accessible and affordable through egalitarian, engaged communities such as those on Hugging Face, the premier open-source AI repository with pre-trained AI models and computing power to train and deploy models.The coming year will see a shift in focus from training to inference, as organisations begin to derive meaningful results from context-aware data-rich workflows. Modelling in healthcare, climate risk estimation for insurance, multimodal AI and faster adoption of digital twins in manufacturing will inevitably boost demand for IT infrastructure. We are primed to release our next-generation all-flash PowerScale systems with smart scale-out features, as well as refresh our PowerEdge line with updated designs and powerful hardware.With GenAI predicted to grow to a $110 billion industry by 2030, and all signals indicating that 2024 will be a year of intense innovation, we are keen to bulwark the networked intelligence of tomorrow that will help organisations generate real-world solutions to business challenges in a rapidly changing environment.

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