Adept, a machine learning research and product lab, is using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and NVIDIA technology to develop a universal AI teammate capable of performing a range of tasks people execute on their computer or on the internet. Running thousands of NVIDIA GPUs on clusters of OCI bare metal compute instances and taking advantage of OCI’s network bandwidth, Adept can train large-scale AI and ML models faster and more economically than before. As a result, Adept has been able to rapidly advance its general intelligence roadmap and develop its first product—a rich language interface for the tools knowledge workers use every day to be productive and creative.

A Highly Scalable, Performant, and Cost-Effective Platform for AI Innovation

With OCI as its preferred cloud platform, Adept obtains the scale and high performance necessary to run massive AI models without excessive compute costs. This has enabled Adept to develop a highly flexible and dynamic natural-language interface for all software that significantly streamlines the tasks knowledge workers execute daily. As a result, users can ask their computer to perform tedious, difficult, or abstract functions, as well as use the interface to test creative ideas.

To fully support Adept with the compute capacity it required, Oracle and NVIDIA customized their offerings to ensure Adept had access to thousands of NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs needed to train its complex models. Adept, which recently closed a $65 million funding round, is training a giant AI model on OCI using NVIDIA’s most powerful A100 GPUs connected with best-of-breed RoCE network powered by NVIDIA (NICs).

“AI continues to rapidly grow in scope but until now, AI models could only read and write text and images; they couldn’t actually execute actions such as designing 3D parts or fetching and analyzing data,” said David Luan, chief executive officer, Adept. “With the scalability and computing power of OCI and NVIDIA technology, we are training a neural network to use every software application, website, and API in existence—building on the capabilities that software makers have already created. The universal AI teammate gives employees an ‘extra set of hands’ to create as fast as they think and reduce time spent on manual tasks. This in turn will help their organizations become more productive, and nimble in their decision making.”

“Adept has exciting, bold ambitions for the future of AI, and we’re honored that the company’s team of AI and ML trailblazers recognized OCI’s ability to support highly innovative and compute-heavy projects like Adept’s universal AI assistant,” said Karan Batta, vice president, product management, OCI. “With the combined computing power of OCI and NVIDIA, innovators like Adept are poised to unleash the full potential of AI as a technology that can transform how work is done and make every knowledge worker in the world much more productive.”

“With brilliant minds from DeepMind, OpenAI, and other AI and ML pioneers, Adept is building the next generation of user interfaces for software applications,” said Kari Briski, vice president, AI and high-performance computing (HPC) software development kits, NVIDIA. “By working with Oracle to provide Adept with an industry-leading GPU engine and a wide range of AI and ML software tools, we’re making innovative AI systems possible.”

OCI Powers Next-Generation AI Models

OCI’s bare metal NVIDIA GPU instances offer startups like Adept an HPC platform for applications that rely on machine learning, image processing, and massively parallel HPC jobs. In addition, HPC on OCI provides the elasticity and consumption-based costs of the cloud, offering on-demand potential to scale tens of thousands of cores simultaneously. As a result, with HPC on OCI, customers like Adept gain access to powerful processors, fast and dense local storage, high-throughput ultra-low-latency RDMA cluster networks, and the tools to automate and run jobs seamlessly.

Additional Resources

• Learn more about OCI’s NVIDIA GPU-powered offerings for AI innovators
• Learn more about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
• Get started with the OCI Cloud Adoption Framework