Snowflake has released Arctic, an open-source large language model (LLM) designed to deliver top-tier intelligence and efficiency at scale, and optimised for complex enterprise workloads. The company’s debut of its own open-source LLM takes it into competition with the likes of OpenAI’s GPT-4, Google’s Gemini, Meta Platforms’ Llama 2 and Mistral AI’s Mixtral.
Snowflake Arctic is based on a ‘mixture-of-experts’ architecture and is part of the company’s LLM family that includes practical text-embedding models for retrieval use cases. Underlining the openness of the LLM, Snowflake is releasing Arctic’s weights under an Apache 2.0 license and details of the research leading to how it was trained.
“By delivering intelligence and efficiency in a truly open way to the AI community, we are furthering what open-source AI can do. Our research with Arctic will enhance our capability to deliver reliable, efficient AI to our customers,” says Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO at Snowflake.
Snowflake Arctic includes code templates and flexible inference and training options so users can get started quickly with deploying and customising Arctic using their preferred frameworks. These will include NVIDIA NIM with NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, and Hugging Face, a machine learning and data science platform and community that helps users build, deploy and train machine learning models, and provides infrastructure to demo, run and deploy AI in live applications.
For immediate use, Arctic is available for serverless inference in Snowflake Cortex, Snowflake’s fully managed service that offers machine learning and AI solutions in the Data Cloud. It will also be available on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Hugging Face, Lamini, NVIDIA API catalog, Perplexity and Together AI. When accessed in Snowflake Cortex, Arctic will accelerate customers’ ability to build production-grade AI apps at scale, within the security and governance perimeter of the Data Cloud.
Clement Delangue, CEO and co-founder at Hugging Face, concludes: “There has been a massive wave of open-source AI in the past few months. Snowflake is contributing significantly with this release not only of the model with an Apache 2.0 license but also with details on how it was trained. It gives the necessary transparency and control for enterprises to build AI and for the field as a whole to break new ground.”
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