Oracle, ChatGPT and “sovereign” cloud states will seek to | Wilnesh News

Every tech company is talking about its artificial intelligence opportunities. Oracle is no exception. But during a March earnings call, Oracle’s Larry Ellison laid out a future market opportunity that focused on a major customer that investors might not consider as often as Fortune 500 companies. the customer.

The Oracle founder, former CEO, and current chairman and chief technology officer believes that national and state government applications are running on platforms such as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to a much greater extent than today, and said this is starting to occur in many ways. happen in a way.

“You know, we’re talking about winning corporate business. For the first time, we’re starting to win business for the country,” Allison said. “We are negotiating with many national governments on sovereign regional issues.”

Big tech companies vying for massive government cloud contracts is nothing new. Microsoft and Amazon have been locked in a lengthy battle over cloud deals with the Department of Defense, with the two artificial intelligence companies, along with Oracle and Google, ultimately winning $9 billion in Defense Department contracts in 2022.

But Allison took his prediction a step further when speaking to analysts On a recent earnings callsaid “Every government, almost every government, wants a sovereign cloud and a government-only zone.”

Oracle, which has partnered with Nvidia and Microsoft to develop generative artificial intelligence capabilities, has helped reduce red tape in various countries using cloud technology. One of the examples Allison gave was Albania.This is Try to join the EU with chatGPTgenerating artificial intelligence to help decipher and summarize its laws and help the country make the things it needs to change to comply with EU regulations.

“It took Serbia eight years to harmonize its laws to join the EU,” Allison said. “Albania faced the same problem, but with the help of generative AI, we could read the entire text of Albanian laws and in about 18 It will take months to two years to truly harmonize its laws with the EU.”

Some analysts were skeptical of Ellison’s speech, viewing it as nothing more than a typical gathering of senior executives from key business units. Oracle shares are up about 21% so far this year, but Barclays analyst Raimo Lenschow expressed concern about the slowdown in OCI growth in its latest earnings report, which could “worry investors because it is the main investment story.”

Future versions featuring cloud services and artificial intelligence-driven solutions could make government more efficient. First, redundancy is a government focus during disasters and disaster recovery, Allison said. But it’s also getting into health care information and Internet access projects.

Countries including Serbia are standardizing on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and using generative artificial intelligence to automate processes such as healthcare. Deals are underway in Kenya and Rwanda to partner with Elon Musk’s Starlink to bring internet service to remote areas, with OCI and Starlink mapping rural farms to see which crops are growing in which areas and whether they are getting enough nutrients , such as nitrogen and water.

“These maps are AI-assisted and can help them plan agricultural yields, predict agricultural yields, forecast markets, the logistics of agricultural output, all of these things as next-generation national applications,” Allison said.

Food security, internet access in rural schools and rural hospitals are what Ellison calls “all kinds of interesting new AI applications that you may have never heard of before, at least I haven’t heard of before.” We have been working on it for the past 12 months and are now delivering. “

He also mentioned “comprehensive” automation of vaccination programs and other health care programs.

“We live in a world where data and information are the gold of the future,” said Dan Gardner, CEO of digital strategy agency Code and Theory. “If governments can get data and act on it faster, why should we slow down? We want to be as efficient as possible. A lot of it is like regular human resources, and maybe those people could be doing some other more valuable things.”

The cloud and generative AI applications allow countries to provide access to rural areas, increasing educational opportunities and creating more economic value. It could also give citizens a deeper understanding of government processes, said Tapan Parikh, an associate professor at Cornell University. “One thing that technology has been good at is potentially making bureaucracies more efficient, or at least more transparent internally,” he said.

“Black Mirror” Government

But the push to move more government processes to the cloud also opens the door to new risks, especially as countries trust newly developed generative artificial intelligence systems. While they may make processes faster than ever before, as technology evolves, errors are bound to occur and could give cybercriminals access to citizen data.

“We shouldn’t use these technologies as an excuse not to have oversight and control over the political process,” Parikh said. “Certainly, I think it’s a very important thing, especially when you’re dealing with people who may not have the same governance capabilities. When dealing with countries.”

Oracle did not respond to a request for additional comment on Ellison’s earnings call discussion.

“There’s a bad side to Black Mirror: Big Brother, the data war, the artificial intelligence war, etc.,” Gadde said. “It’s incredible in terms of cutting out red tape, increasing efficiencies, and making better use of crops across the country. These are the multiples where artificial intelligence can truly improve humanity.”

Artificial intelligence raises a host of concerns.

Gardner points to the proliferation of more generative content around the world in an election year, as well as all the issues associated with technological disruption. “Maybe it’s not like a chip on the ground. But it’s all the connection points between data security, who you are, who the government is, authentication of what you’re looking at, financial systems and AI governance. Using AI as It’s pretty scary for a tool to break.”

Simone Bohnenberger, chief product officer of the cloud company, said: “No big government in the world has the ability to completely move all services, especially critical services such as defense, taxation, and health care, to the cloud and hand them over to a new generation. In the hands of artificial intelligence.” phrase. “I think it’s irresponsible. The potential risks outweigh the benefits.”

OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, was trained primarily on existing content on the web. Bonaberg says this can cause problems, especially when texts in lesser-known languages ​​such as Albanian need to be analyzed.

“If you look at the World Wide Web or the Internet, the vast majority of content is in English, I think a quarter of the content is in English, followed by Chinese,” she said. “Albanian is a minority language. To me, it’s very questionable how well this actually works for a small country like Albania and an outlier language because there’s not a lot of data to train the model on. If you don’t Too much data and the output will be very confusing.”

Parikh said allowing foreign companies to access citizens’ data poses security and data risks.Even the United States, with all its resources, is vulnerable to data hacks, including the recent contractor incident in February CGI Federation This exposed employees’ personally identifiable information. The recent battle between China and the United States over TikTok is an example of how control of sensitive consumer data feeds into geopolitics. “I think it’s certainly a concern for countries that are working with suppliers from different countries,” Parikh said.