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Sovereign AI

Written by Keith Parker | May 6, 2024

Artificial intelligence has become vital to nations, governments, and large corporations. Many of these large organizations are implementing Sovereign AI systems, which will provide them with artificial intelligence services, including infrastructure, data, models, and a trained workforce combined with the security and data privacy features that will enable them to achieve their agenda.  A Sovereign AI solution is one that is fully contained with an entity, such as a company or country, and enables the organization to meet its objectives while maintaining security and privacy.

Governments commonly invest in domestic infrastructure and other programs to advance their national capacity for transportation, defense, healthcare, economic production and more. Similarly, large enterprises build out their own infrastructure to speed time to market, streamline processes, harden their supply chain, and better serve their customers. While there is no longer debate about the importance of successfully applying artificial intelligence by governments and industry, identifying and deploying a complete solution at the scale required for these large organizations and with the necessary data governance, has remained elusive. Until now.

SambaNova Systems, creators of the first full stack, from chips to models, generative AI platform purpose built for the enterprise, is delivering the ideal generative AI platform for Sovereign AI.

The SambaNova solution can drive domestic development and ownership of AI assets through four key components: infrastructure, models based on a Composition of Experts (CoE) architecture, model ownership, and partnership.

Infrastructure

The SambaNova Suite platform is the first, full stack hardware-software system purpose-built for generative AI. It is powered by the fourth generation SambaNova RDU, the SN40L which is uniquely capable of performing both AI training and inference with industry leading performance and a significantly smaller footprint than other solutions.

Delivered as a rack-scale, on-premises solution in the customer data center or as a dedicated cloud instance, only SambaNova Suite offers the performance, small footprint, and dedicated, private hardware with the performance and scale needed for an AI program serving a nation or multinational corporation.

Samba-1: A Composition of Experts

Delivering on the accuracy and broad use cases of Sovereign AI will require the largest models possible. The Samba-1 trillion parameter generative AI model, built with a CoE architecture, delivers a solution with the accuracy and ability to address the broad range of use cases that can only be addressed by large models, combined with the low inference costs and flexibility of small models, and none of the drawbacks of either.

Samba-1 is an aggregate of over 50 state-of-the-art open source models that operate as a single model. The entire system is managed from a single endpoint for maximum efficiency. Each expert model can be fine tuned to perform a given function with industry leading accuracy. The unique nature of the CoE architecture provides the model with the capability to implement role based access controls, which are not available in any other AI model architecture.

The models that power Samba-1 include the SambaLingo model, which delivers multilingual support, across a wide number of languages to enable users to utilize AI resources in the language of their choice.

Using Samba-1, large organizations can take advantage of all the high performance, flexibility, and accuracy the CoE architecture provides. They can fine tune models quickly and easily from a single endpoint. In addition, they can also build and train their own custom models and incorporate them into their private instance of Samba-1.  

Model Ownership

Any AI model can be trained with open data. To deliver meaningful value, models must be further fine tuned with private data. This enables the model to process content that is not available in open datasets.

A core component of Sovereign AI is that data remains secure and private. Once a model has been fine tuned with data, that data is then in the model. If the model lies outside of the organization or if an entity that is not under its jurisdiction of that organization has ownership of the model, then the data can no longer be considered sovereign.

The SambaNova Suite platform was built and designed with security and data privacy as primary features and model ownership is a core component of this. With SambaNova, once a model has been trained on private data the customer then becomes the owner of that model in perpetuity. This ensures that the model and the data it has been trained on stays within the confines of the customer environment.

Partnership

At SambaNova we believe that we must empower the customer to be successful. To that end, when a customer acquires a SambaNova platform, our team of dedicated AI experts will work with the customer to ensure that they achieve their goals.