5 Marshall Choy

SVP Product, SambaNova

SambaNova Systems SVP of Product

Marshall Choy speaks to AI Magazine about Dataflow-as-a-Service and the key role of AI in digital transformations

An experienced products and solutions leader, Marshall Choy, SVP of Product at SambaNova Systems, is skilled in AI/ ML, cloud, data centre, management, pre-sales, solution architecture, and technical leadership. Having held previous roles at Oracle and Sun Microsystems, he joined SambaNova in 2018.

Q. Tell me about SambaNova, your role and your responsibilities there?

» SambaNova turned five years old last November. We’re a growth-stage start-up, focusing on developing and delivering game-changing deep-learning products and solutions. Our mission is to develop the capabilities that enable businesses and organisations to transform their technology stack and accelerate their business with deep learning.

My responsibility, as Senior VP of Product, is to oversee the definition, development, design, and delivery of our products. I work closely across all organisations – both internally and externally – with our customers and partners. What I find most exciting about my role is being able to touch every aspect of the product development lifestyle. From ideation to deployment at a customer site, I get to know every organisation and person involved in the process.

Q. Why do you think AI is critical for a company’s digital transformation journey?

» AI is critical not just as the enabler, but as the accelerant for a company’s digital transformation journey. It is the driving force for businesses today and in the future. When you look at prior digital transformations in the last couple of decades, two milestones come to mind. More recently, it’s the advent of mobile computing; before that, the big bang that was the internet. I believe AI will have an even greater magnitude of impact than the last two technology shifts we’ve seen over the last 20 years or so.

AI has the potential to reshape the Fortune 500, just like the internet did. Established, decades-old players could fall away while unknown, disruptive challengers could rise and become the next leaders of industries. The defining factor determining the winners will be their adoption of AI: to ride out the coming wave, or rise to the top, companies need to adopt AI as a key tenet of their digital transformation strategy.

Digital transformation driven by AI has massive implications across three significant areas: first, and most obviously, is the technology stack; second is the way that AI will transform the business processes and operations of the firm; third, and perhaps most importantly, is the transformation that AI will have on the organisation.

AI will change the nature of work. This is because AI-enhanced automation can take over tasks that are mundane, repetitive, and error-prone when performed by a human. This allows humans to operate in a more strategic manner and perform more innovative, creative, or emotional tasks –in short, more innately human activities.

How do you structure your organisation to really harness this potential? Such change begins from the top, at the C-level. Engagement, ownership, governance, and investment into centres of excellence. These are the keys to fostering an AI-driven culture throughout the organisation. A means to make the firm not just a user of AI to start off with, but – in the end – a firm that has been totally transformed by AI. In effect, an ‘AI-native’ organisation.

Q. Tell me about Dataflow-as-a-Service – how does it support customers and improve their operations?

» Dataflow-as-a-Service is an evolution of SambaNova’s product offerings. It supports customers ideally as it has been 100% driven by customer feedback since the first iteration. A key lesson we have taken from our customers is that many are moving from model-centric computing to data-centric computing. Dataflow-as-aService enables end-users to engage with AI computing from a data-centric standpoint. It provides the machine learning model and the underlying infrastructure, right-sized, and made available in an applicationfriendly, accessible way through APIs. Gone are the days when end-users need years of experience developing machine learning models. SambaNova selects and provides the optimal model for the use cases that the customer needs. We make these models accessible through said APIs and ensure they can be plugged in effortlessly at the application level.

This leaves the end-user customer to focus on their areas of expertise: their dataset and their applications. The rest of AI transformations’ complexity can be left to SambaNova, provided to them as-a-Service.

Q. How have you seen AI and ML transform the way you work?

» There are two trends happening right now that are transforming how AI is being used in organisations, which is ultimately changing how we work.

The first is the growth of multiple model deployments. This is the convergence of different types of AI models within a single pipeline – one well-known example is the combination of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision that has resulted in OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.

Another more practical multiple model example is in language models pulling out anomalies in a text-log that are subsequently fed into a recommendation algorithm. We all know recommendation engines from the ‘you bought this, perhaps you’d like this’ use case in ecommerce, but in the context of an NLP model, it can be leveraged to provide a recommendation of the next best action to a support analyst when remediating the anomaly seen in the text log.

The second trend I’m seeing is the convergence of machine learning models. Go back just three years and there were hundreds of new research papers about machine learning models coming out each week, with there being concerns that model growth was out of control. Now, the trajectory has reversed. There’s less specificity and more generalisation, which is resulting in a more finite number of models.

Q. What is next for SambaNova, what can we expect in the future?

» Stay tuned for the specifics of what’s coming next for SambaNova. However, where we’re seeing the market moving, in terms of customer demand for many companies is, again, more towards data-centric computing driven by AI. As the first movers accelerate past their peers then the rest of the market will naturally want to follow them.

The real challenge in the near future in this industry is the skills crunch. We ran some research recently that found over 80% of enterprise tech managers are struggling to hire AI talent and over half are finding retention a challenge too.

Businesses want to adopt AI models in various aspects of their organisation and this change is coming from the top – the C-suite and leadership team. If you think about it, we’re already very much in an AI-driven world, so AI should be at the heart of business strategy. It's just that not every business realises it yet.