AI Without the Risk: How Snowflake’s Cortex Guard Makes Gen AI Safe for Enterprise

Over the past couple of years, Snowflake has really doubled down on empowering its customers with cutting-edge AI tools. They are focusing on providing easy, efficient, and safe generative AI for enterprise use. Recently they announced the general availability of Cortex Guard, which is a new feature of Snowflake Cortex AI that is designed to enable enterprises to seamlessly integrate safeguards into their large language model (LLM) applications.

Cortex Guard ensures safe, production-ready generative AI applications by filtering potentially harmful or inappropriate content. In this article we will discuss how Cortex Guard makes it easier for you to confidently scale from proof-of-concept to production-ready GenAI application.

Why LLM Safety Matters

As generative AI applications transition from experimental to enterprise-wide deployments, ensuring safety becomes a top priority.

When an organization scales its generative AI application to thousands of users, the chances of harmful interactions, such as inappropriate, hateful, or violent content, naturally increase. These risks can delay or even prevent the adoption of powerful AI tools.

CHALLENGE: For enterprises, safety is critical for maintaining the integrity of LLM applications. It’s essential to implement robust safety measures that filter out undesirable content.

NEED: You need to harness the potential of AI without risking your business’s reputation or violating organizational policies.

SOLUTION: Cortex Guard addresses these challenges by offering a simple yet powerful solution for safeguarding user interactions.

The Power of Cortex Guard: Safe and Scalable

Cortex Guard introduces a layer of security that evaluates both inputs and outputs, ensuring they remain aligned with organizational standards. This safeguard empowers enterprises to deploy LLMs confidently, knowing that responses that could violate safety protocols will be automatically filtered.

Why Cortex Guard?

Cortex Guard is the answer to deploying your AI applications in a safe and secure way at scale. It helps with

1. Risk Mitigation: It helps prevent the generation of content related to violent crimes, hate speech, sexual content, or self-harm, reducing legal and reputational risks.
2. Compliance: For industries with strict regulatory requirements, Cortex Guard helps maintain compliance by filtering out potentially sensitive or inappropriate information.
3. User Trust: By ensuring safer AI interactions, companies can build and maintain trust with their users and stakeholders.
4. Ethical AI Use: It promotes responsible AI usage by automatically filtering out harmful content, aligning with ethical AI principles.

Implementing Cortex Guard

Implementing Cortex Guard in Snowflake Cortex AI is straightforward, requiring only a simple parameter addition in Cortex AI COMPLETE function.

By adding ‘guardrails’: true to the request, Cortex Guard takes over, automatically filtering out harmful content. When inappropriate content is detected, the response is replaced with a message: “Response filtered by Cortex Guard.”

This simple implementation is designed to scale effortlessly, providing robust security without imposing significant cost or operational overhead.

Powered by Meta’s Llama Guard 2

At the core of Cortex Guard’s functionality is Llama Guard 2, Snowflake’s safety engine developed in partnership with Meta. Llama Guard 2 rigorously evaluates responses to detect and filter harmful content, covering areas such as violent crimes, hate speech, sexual content, self-harm, and more.

Built for Enterprise: Easy, Efficient, and Effective

Cortex Guard was developed with enterprise production in mind, focusing on three core principles:

1. Easy to Implement: Integrating Cortex Guard into your LLM workflows is effortless, requiring no deep AI expertise or complex engineering. Enterprises can quickly add this layer of protection, making it accessible to teams across the organization.
2. Efficient: Cortex Guard introduces minimal impact on response times, allowing businesses to meet their production-level service level agreements (SLAs) without sacrificing safety. Benchmarks and latency tests have been rigorously conducted to ensure high performance.
3. Enterprise-Ready: Beyond just filtering content, Cortex Guard offers advanced customization, allowing businesses to align their AI applications with internal safety policies and governance standards.

Conclusion

Cortex Guard empowers you to confidently deploy their AI applications at scale, ensuring the highest level of safety for your users and businesses alike. As you prepare to take your gen AI application from concept to production, make Cortex Guard a part of your strategy — and unlock the full potential of AI without compromising on security.

Snowflake Meta #llamaguard #cortexguard #governance #security #AI #ML #genAI

#datacloud #LLM

Honarable mention to key people at Snowflake

Christian Kleinerman – Senior Vice President of Product at Snowflake, overseeing major AI initiatives.

Christopher Child – Vice President of Product Management, AI and Machine Learning, responsible for Snowflake Cortex developments.

Benoit Dageville – Co-founder and President of Products at Snowflake, with key involvement in product strategy, including AI integrations.

Jeremy Salfen – Senior Product Manager for AI, who may be involved with Snowflake Cortex AI innovations.