Dell Technologies has announced a slew of new options across its AI ecosystem, driven by expanded partnerships with some of the biggest players in the AI world.
A key plank of Dell Technologies’ pitch for its AI ecosystem is helping customers bring AI to their data rather than the other way around, through the use of on premises deployment of smaller language models.
With this in mind, the firm has announced Dell Enterprise Hub, a new portal on Hugging Face, the open source platform for machine learning (ML). This allows customers to deploy popular open source large language models (LLMs) via Dell’s on-premises infrastructure, alongside dedicated containers and scripts to integrate AI within their ecosystem.
Dell is Hugging Face’s preferred infrastructure provider to support the deployment of open source generative AI models, with models on the platform optimized for enterprise adoption on the tech giant’s hardware.
Customers looking to leverage validated models on Hugging Face can do so with assistance through Accelerator Services for Dell Enterprise Hub, a new service that will see Dell provide advice on model choices depending on business needs and work to reduce time to value for LLM deployment.
Continuing its collaboration with Meta, Dell has also announced support for the company’s most powerful LLM, Llama 3. Dell stated that its PowerEdge XE9680 is optimal for running the most powerful 70 billion parameter version of the model, which is competitive with other models such as Google’s Gemini Pro 1.0 while being free and cheaper to run.
As with its Hugging Face partnership, Dell will provide its customers with guidance on leveraging Llama 3 within their environment and work with them to fine-tune the model for better performance using Dell infrastructure.
Dell announces closer ties with Microsoft and streamlined AI adoption
Across the announcements, Dell says it aims to make enterprise AI adoption as smooth as possible via a turnkey process. This also applies to its existing connections with Microsoft Azure, which Dell is expanding to include more Microsoft AI services.
Dell has also announced an improvement to Apex Cloud Platform with Microsoft Azure, through which customers can harness Microsoft Azure AI features within their on-prem environment with the same API connections as in Azure.
In a call with assembled media Varun Chhabra, SVP infrastructure systems group marketing at Dell Technologies, gave example use cases such as language translation, document intelligence, and computer vision being realized through Azure AI but closer to customer data.
Another new announcement connected to Microsoft is Dell Services for Microsoft Copilot Solutions. This builds on Dell’s existing generative AI services catalog in offering customers professional services to prepare, deploy, and scale Microsoft Copilot products such as Microsoft Copilot for Security or GitHub Copilot.
Once Dell customers have rolled Copilot out, Dell will provide ongoing sessions to help workforces grapple with the tool and to help businesses meet their goals.
“Our approach with Copilot goes well beyond the readiness of the technical environment and implementation,” Chhabra said.
“Our services capabilities here also help customers to make sure that their data is secure, as well as knowledge workers are primed to fully utilize them. The way we do this is we first help customers assess the environment they’re working in, to identify their user requirements as well as their mapping needs for data.”
Rory Bathgate is covering Dell Technologies World 2024 between 20 and 24 May. Stay up-to-date with live coverage of all the announcements and more on ITPro.
