Blasting Off with Arctic: Snowflake's Truly Open LLM

In the inaugural issue of Snowflake's monthly newsletter, Data Cloud Dispatch, dive into the latest product announcements, explore technical resources to upskill, and stay updated on upcoming events.

Thought-Leadership Snippet

"The future of LLMs is likely to be driven by customization, expanded application, enhanced interpretability, and handling complex tasks with higher accuracy. Snowflake Arctic is a huge step towards our vision of enabling enterprises and hobbyists alike to apply this technology to large, private datasets. We hope to drive collective innovation, while pushing the boundaries to redefine what’s possible."?– Adrien Treuille, Co-Founder and CEO of Streamlit (acquired by Snowflake)

Product Digest

Charting New Territories with Snowflake Arctic

Arctic, Snowflake’s new truly open model with an Apache 2.0 license, brings a new era of innovation in the world of AI. ?Arctic is more capable than other open source models trained with a similar compute budget, and its intelligence was achieved with breakthrough efficiency.

How is Arctic different?

• Efficient Intelligence: Arctic excels at enterprise tasks such as SQL generation, coding, and instruction to create a new baseline for high quality, custom models at a low cost.
• Truly Open: The Apache 2.0 license provides ungated access to weights and code. Arctic was built upon the collective experiences of our diverse team, as well as major insights and learnings from the community. Since collaboration is key to innovation, we will be open sourcing all of our data recipes and insights to share with the research community through code cookbooks. The cookbook spans a breadth of 20 topics, including pre-training, fine-tuning, inference, and evaluation, while also delving into modeling, data, systems and infrastructure.

Try it out! Chat with Arctic on the Streamlit Community Cloud or on Hugging Face Streamlit Spaces.?

Content Roundup

Snowflake Copilot Now in Public Preview

Snowflake Copilot is an AI-powered SQL assistant leveraging machine learning models to understand and interpret user queries, offer intelligent suggestions, auto-complete features, and real-time error detection. Make SQL coding accessible and improve your productivity. Try it today while it’s free until May 31, 2024!?

Tips for using Snowflake Copilot:?

1. Be as specific as possible when asking your question
2. Use descriptive and easy-to-understand names for views and columns
3. Define commonly used metrics/expressions as new columns

Snowflake Cortex on Iceberg Tables

Now with Snowflake Cortex you can run Serverless SQL LLM functions on Iceberg Tables. Understand how to use large language models on an open lakehouse architecture.

Get started today with these hands-on technical resources:?

• Snowflake Cortex LLM functions source code
• Walk through this step-by-step Quickstart guide to get started with Iceberg Tables

Snowflake Marketplace Spotlight

The Snowflake Marketplace is a centralized hub for users to access & share datasets, applications, connectors, and more. From industry-specific data to advanced analytics tools, explore the digital marketplace today. Here’s what’s new this month:?

• Opoint Global Web News [Dataset]: Opoint gathers news from 235,000+ sources across the web and creates an organized data feed in a machine-readable format. Tailor the content to your preferences and empower yourself to make informed decisions.?

• Dark Data Discovery by NTT [Snowflake Native App]: Ever wonder what to do with the data you store and process during routine operations, but don’t use? Uncover unused data, leverage it for informed decision-making, and develop new business strategies.?
• Orka File Loader [Connector]: Seamlessly perform data loading for files with different formats and extract essential data from flat files.

A Peek into Data Cloud Summit

Explore curated agendas built by Snowflake executives, technical leaders, and Data Superheroes. View the session catalog and build your agenda today.?

It’s not too late to register for Data Cloud Summit. Our Partner Basecamp will feature everything from robots, putt putt golf, magicians, an F1 simulator, and plenty of giveaways. Enjoy 25% off the current ticket price when you apply this code at checkout: DCS24-CAPINVITE25.?

Register today for #DataCloudDevDay, Snowflake’s free, in-person, day long event on June 6th in San Francisco.

Get a front row seat to hear luminary speakers such as Andrew Ng (Founder & CEO, Landing AI) and Richard Socher (CEO, You.com, Former Chief Scientist at Salesforce) both of whom were ranked in the 100 most influential people in AI by TIME Magazine. There will also be interactive demos, partner kiosks, an augmented reality photo booth, build your own lego station, GenAI bootcamps, and more! Refer your peers to attend for a chance to win.??

Expand Your Snowflake Knowledge

Here's what's coming soon:

• April 25 | Want to learn how you can use Snowflake Cortex? Join AI / ML Architect Carlos Carrero to build an end-to-end RAG application securely and easily. Continue your journey by exploring the session on Snowflake Cortex ML-Based Functions on May 15.??
• May 22 | New to Snowflake? Not sure where to get started? Learn how to navigate the key features of Snowflake and explore the user interface. All you need to do is create a free trial account and we’ll take care of the rest! Sign up today.
• May 29 | Build and deploy your first Snowflake Native App to the Snowflake Marketplace with Lead Developer Advocate Gilberto Hernandez who will walk you through step-by-step using the Snowflake VSCode extension and Snowpark.

Developer Pun of the Month

“The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.” Submitted by Dash Desai, Snowflake Lead Developer Advocate

Submit your own developer pun for a chance to be featured in next month's newsletter.

That's all for today. We'll see you next time!