

On March 22, the Business Intelligence Group announced that NetApp® AI was named a winner in its Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards program. NetApp AI won the award for natural language processing (NLP). The Business Intelligence Group was founded with the mission of recognizing true talent and superior performance in the business world. Unlike other industry award programs, these programs are judged by business executives who have experience and knowledge. The organization’s unique proprietary scoring system selectively measures performance across multiple business domains and rewards companies whose achievements stand above those of their peers.
Doing NLP right requires an insane amount of data. Try to imagine every word ever spoken and you’re almost there. NLP has to be able to process, understand, and reference speech input against an immense library of data to create an intelligible response in milliseconds. This requirement is especially difficult given the complexity of human language, which is full of rules and exceptions and becomes even more difficult when you consider the nuances of idioms, sarcasm, and humor. Industry-specific models can also require specific information about a particular domain, company, or products. That’s why the size of conversational AI models has grown to millions or billions of parameters. Typically, the more data, the more accurate the model. Training models of this size can take weeks of compute time and require the best-of-the-best machine learning and deep learning frameworks.
According to Gartner, by 2022, up to 70% of people will be interacting with conversational AI platforms on a daily basis. For real-time natural language processing, data must be able to flow quickly and freely throughout each step of the data pipeline. With NetApp ONTAP® AI powered by NVIDIA DGX systems and NetApp cloud-connected all-flash storage systems, massive, state-of-the-art language models can be trained and optimized to perform inference rapidly.

Since 2019, NetApp AI has won many AI awards and recognitions:
To discover how to adapt as your industry advances, visit the NetApp natural language processing for AI page.