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Dell Technologies is growing its generative AI capabilities with a series of new capabilities announced today at the annual Dell Technologies World conference.
The Dell AI Factory is the company’s new strategy for technologies and services designed to help make AI adoption simpler, more secure and more economical for enterprises. The offering includes a significant expansion of capabilities with Nvidia, going beyond the solutions the two companies detailed in July 2023. The Dell AI Factory with Nvidia, integrates hardware and software from both Dell and Nvidia to help enterprises with gen AI initiatives. Among the specific use cases the Dell AI Factory with Nvidia is helping to target are advanced Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and digital assistants. Dell is also rolling out new hardware to support the recently announced Nvidia Blackwell GPUs.
Dell is also advancing its integration with Hugging Face that was initially announced in November 2023 with more enterprise integrations. The same is true for Dell and Meta, where the two companies are building on the existing partnership for Llama to support Llama 3.
While there are many options for gen AI in the cloud, the overarching goal for Dell is to make it as easy as possible for enterprises to assess gen AI and implement technologies on-premises.
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“Our goal is to help customers get to value with their AI workloads as soon as they can,” Varun Chhabra, senior vice president at Dell Technologies told VentureBeat.
Dell AI Factory for Nvidia moves beyond Project Helix
This isn’t the first Dell Technologies World event where there has been AI news with Nvidia.
A year ago, the two companies announced Project Helix, as an approach to help organizations build and deploy gen AI. A lot has changed in the enterprise gen AI landscape over the past year and the Dell AI Factory with Nvidia is in part a reflection of those changes.
“When we launched Project Helix, it was very heavily on the training side,” Manuvir Das, VP of enterprise computing at Nvidia told VentureBeat. “Now there’s a lot more on the inference side of the house actually using models.”
With a shifting demand toward inference as well as RAG use cases, the recently announced Nvidia NIMs (Nvidia Inference Microservices) approach is now coming to the Dell partnership. Das explained that NIMs help by taking a major deployment problem out of the hands of developers. When a NIMs container is placed on a server, it figures out exactly how to set up the environment to run AI models efficiently, securely, and with the right optimizations for the hardware. This allows developers to just write their applications without having to worry about the lower-level details of deploying and executing models.
Dell and Nvidia accelerate enterprise RAG
Another area that is different than when the initial Project Helix announced was made is how enterprises want to connect to data.
What has increasingly become table stakes over the past year is the RAG approach which ties existing data stores to gen AI deployments. The new Dell Accelerator Services for RAG on Precision AI Workstations is designed to help developers build and test RAG use cases on Dell hardware. The service makes use of Dell Precision Workstations along with the Nvidia AI workbench development platform.
Das explained that the Nvidia NeMo Retriever technology is also part of the mix. NeMo retriever itself does not include a vector database, which is needed to enable RAG. Das said that NeMo Retriever has a pluggable model that supports a variety of vector databases that organizations can choose to deploy as part of a RAG application.
Dell continues to work with partners to grow gen AI
Beyond Nvidia, Dell is working with a number of partners to help extend its gen AI capabilities.
Dell has been working with Hugging Face since November 2023 to bring open models to enterprise users and is now growing the partnership. The new Dell Enterprise Hub aims to make it easier for enterprises to consume models from Hugging Face. The new service curates the best models from Hugging Face with the goal of simplifying the deployment of AI models on-premises.
Dell is also continuing its collaboration with Meta, providing deployment guides and performance testing for Meta’s Llama 3 models, much as it had done the same last year for Llama 2. Additionally, Dell is working with Microsoft to offer Azure AI solutions on Dell infrastructure. The new Dell AI Solution for Microsoft Azure AI Services allows organizations to bring Microsoft Azure AI capabilities on premises with the same APIs that are used in Azure.
“This gives organizations the flexibility to bring various Azure AI services such as language, translation, speech, document intelligence, and vision closer to the vast majority of their data, which is on premises,” Chhabra said.
