Snowflake unveils flagship AI model Arctic to woo enterprises

Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW) has launched its large language model called Snowflake Arctic aimed at enterprises.

The open AI model, which the company calls as "enterprise-grade LLM" is optimized for complex enterprise workloads, topping several industry benchmarks across SQL code generation, instruction following, and more, according to Snowflake.

Snowflake noted that it would deliver the LLM model with an Apache 2.0 license that permits ungated personal, research, and commercial use.

"This is a watershed moment for Snowflake, with our AI research team innovating at the forefront of AI," said Snowflake's CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy.

For immediate use, Arctic is available for serverless inference in Snowflake Cortex, a managed service that offers machine learning and AI solutions in the Data Cloud.

The model will also be available on Amazon's (AMZN), Amazon Web Services, Hugging Face, Lamini, Microsoft (MSFT) Azure, NVIDIA (NVDA) API catalog, Perplexity, Together AI, and more, the company noted.

Snowflake said it is also providing code templates, alongside flexible inference and training options so users can quickly start with customizing Arctic using their preferred frameworks. These will include NVIDIA (NVDA) NIM with NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, and Hugging Face.

Besides Arctic LLM, the Snowflake Arctic family of models also includes the recently announced Arctic embed, a family of text embedding models.

The company noted that the family of five models are available on Hugging Face for immediate use and will be soon available as part of the Snowflake Cortex.

Generative AI services have taken the world by storm since the launch of Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT in 2022. Globally, companies have launched their own LLMs which can provide services such as content, image, video and voice generation, to name a few.

Meta Platforms' (META) Emu Video, Emu Edit, AudioCraft, SeamlessM4T, and Llama 2, Alibaba's (BABA) Tongyi Qianwen 2.0 and Tongyi Wanxiang, Baidu's (BIDU) Ernie Bot, OpenAI's text-to-image tool DALL·E 3, Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL) unit Google's Gemini, Samsung's (OTCPK:SSNLF) Gauss, and Getty Images' (GETY) model called Generative AI by Getty Images, are some of the LLMs, among the many, that have been rolled out.