VMware Explore’s Key Gen AI Statements From AMD, Broadcom, AWS, Google Cloud, Nvidia, Microsoft, Hugging Face

Tech executives shared their thoughts on the early days of generative AI technology, how they are incorporating it into their organizations and where they see the value for customers.

Whether it is boosting productivity, transforming how humans communicate or creating solutions the world cannot yet imagine, the biggest names in cloud and semiconductors took turns explaining the transformational power of generative AI at VMware Explore this week.

Among the CEOs who appeared via video were AMD’s Lisa Su, Broadcom’s Hock Tan, Amazon Web Services’ Adam Selipsky and Google Cloud’s Thomas Kurian. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, meanwhile, appeared on stage with VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram. Each shared their thoughts on the early days of the technology and how the tech giants are incorporating it into their organizations and where they see the value for customers.

It was a collection of infrastructure vendors that are building and imagining iterations of AI in real time and adapting to rapid changes. Also speaking about the power of generative AI were Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie and Hugging Face’s Margaret Mitchell.

[RELATED: VMware, Nvidia Reveal Private AI Foundation To Help Enterprises Run Gen AI Apps]

VMware and Nvidia unveiled their generative AI offering, VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia, which gives customers the ability to run Large Language Models on top of a VMware Cloud Foundation architecture. Then, using Nvidia AI software as well as Nvidia AI hardware, it turns that into an appliance that VMware can make work with any hardware so customers can deploy it where needs dictate.

Nvidia and VMware said the platform will help businesses address concerns around data privacy, security and control when building generative AI applications on the infrastructure of their choice. It launches early next year.

VMware Private AI Foundation will initially be supported by systems with Nvidia GPUs, DPUs and SmartNICs from Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lenovo. Support for the public cloud will come “in the future,” according to the companies.

CRN was at the show and collected the boldest statements about the revolutionary technology from the biggest names in tech who are making it real.

Adam Selipsky, AWS CEO

Generative AI is going to transform practically every application. Improving employee productivity. Being able to search and get answers rapidly and accurately across the full corpus of information that your organization holds. This is an explosive, exciting, new technology.

Hock Tan, Broadcom President, CEO

It is surprising how much of the public imagination it has captured. I think what makes it exciting is that we are in new, uncharted territory.

Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud CEO

It’s helping people, for example, reach customers in new ways. We’re working with not just other companies, but also other governments to ensure the right policies are designed around these models to protect their use. What AI to us now is taking the power of digital and the skills to understand different personas and putting that behind a simple interface. That’s enormously powerful.

Lisa Su, AMD Chair, CEO

AI has been around for a long, long time and it’s always been an important technology. Every aspect of the enterprise can benefit from AI.

It’s heavy in R&D. We believe it will help us make better products. As much as we want to use the technology, it is so important for our data to be protected.

What generative AI really allows you to do is to think differently about how do you use your intellectual property.

Raghu Raghuram, VMware CEO

For any meaningful enterprise, their data lives in all types of locations. Distributed computing and multi-cloud will be at the very foundation of AI. There’s no separating the two.

What this is going to do in the long run is enable us to understand global scale problems in a much deeper fashion and therefore create new solutions that we can hardly even imagine today.

Jensen Huang , Nvidia Founder, President, CEO

We’ve been working for many years on this dream, on this vision. A quarter of a century ago VMware reinvented enterprise computing and it defines it to this day. VMware is the operating system of how the world’s companies are run. Well today, we are reinventing enterprise computing after a quarter of a century in order to transition to accelerated computing and AI.

Our teams, hundreds of engineers worked on this for several years. This is ground-breaking computer science. Instead of virtualizing applications to run on CPUs. We virtualized the GPUs. We make it possible for VMware to run bare-metal performance with all of its security and manageability across multiple GPUs, multiple nodes, to process these giant language models, to deploy it end to end and to be completely multi-cloud.

Scott Guthrie, Microsoft EVP, Cloud And AI Group

What AI is going to allow us to do is fundamentally rethink many business processes. Our job is how do we make multi-cloud possible and easy, both in terms of private clouds and public clouds, but also across multiple public cloud vendors. It is going to require all of us to learn new things. But I think it is also going to unlock tremendous opportunity and potential for all of us.

Margaret Mitchell, Hugging Face Chief Ethics Scientist

Generating videos. Generating stories. Language Learning. AI can be seen as having a machine learning pipeline. And if you follow the pipeline, the basic start of all the issues is who is defining the problems at the start. This is where you need diverse people. People with different characteristics who feel included, who feel comfortable speaking up.

AI, as it’s going now, can really break down any sort of barriers when it comes to communicating with anyone around the world.

Potentially, that can lead to very good outcomes. People innovating on top of one another, being able to pool knowledge and that kind of thing.