LAS VEGAS – Oracle Corp. Chairman Larry Ellison TK at the company’s annual artificial intelligence (AI) conference here on Tuesday.
“AI changes everything. That’s saying a lot, but it is close,” said Ellison, who is also chief technology officer of the company. “The great opportunity is the use of these remarkable electronic brains to solve society’s most-enduring problems… We will live better lives through better health care, homes, productivity at work.”
“This idea is AI is just this bubble,” he said, adding that Oracle is involved in training more multimodal AI models than anyone – including models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta Platforms Inc., Google, and xAI. “The smartest people I know are investing their fortunes in the technology — Elon (Musk), Mark (Zuckerberg), Sam (Altman). This is the highest value technology we have ever seen so far.”
The Oracle AI Data Platform, announced Tuesday, adds private data to AI models – a difficult task that offers a cornerstone in corporate adoption of AI, he said.
In recent weeks, the database pioneer has gone all-in, and then some, on AI. It started with a splash in January with Stargate, a $500 billion project with OpenAI, SoftBank, and others to mass produce data centers in the U.S. the next few years. This week, it launched its AI Data Platform, the company’s latest effort to help enterprises integrate generative AI with their existing data infrastructure and business operations. And it plans to deploy 50,000 Advanced Micro Devices graphics processors for AI workloads, marking a significant expansion of alternatives to NVIDIA Corp.’s dominant position in the AI chip market.
“Starting with Larry, there has been a fundamental belief here that AI is important across social and economic factors. It is all-consuming in all ways,” Pradeep Vincent, chief technical architect at OCI, said in an interview.
Ellison’s technological sermon on productivity and efficiency was underpinned by results from the company’s sponsored vehicle in Formula One, Oracle Red Bull Racing.
Since injecting AI into its racing team and companywide operation, Red Bull and its four-time world champion driver, Max Verstappen, have seen marked improvement in results. In September, Verstappen – aided in part by real-time data from AI – recorded the fastest lap and race in the organization’s 75-year history at the Italian Grand Prix.
“F1 is the hottest test bed to show off technology,” Martin Galphin, head of software engineering of Oracle Red Bull Racing, said in an interview. “We were able to simulate race results in Monte Carlo 8 billion times. It’s part of pre-race strategy for qualifying, yellow flag procedures and other regulations, pit crew analysis, assessing weather, climate, and racecourse conditions.”
The allure of AI goes far beyond the racetrack for Red Bull. The 2,000-person company applies the technology to human resources, CRM, and finance. “Logistically, it’s a huge benefit for what is a challenging competition,” Galphin said.
To wit: Each of Formula One’s 24 races on five continents over nine months is a Super Bowl-like event in and of itself. It is common practice for a racing team to make 1,000 changes to a car between races every two weeks, he said.
To that end Red Bull, like other Oracle AI customers, are using a mix of open-source models to achieve significant results.
Roger Barga, senior vice president of AI and machine learning at Oracle, says it’s all part of a solution to ramp up reliability in chat bot use without compromising security and compliance.
“We are fully aware of the risks involved” in unfettered AI use, Barga said in an interview, pointing to a new study in the UK that shows three-fourths of employees use AI “behind the scenes in an unregulated fashion,” he said.
