Microsoft Corp. and analytics vendor Teradata Corp. have partnered on a new offering now in public preview to help customers train custom large language models.

The launch of Teradata’s Ask.ai for VantageCloud Lake on Azure allows users to query data in an LLM from OpenAI that runs on the Microsoft Azure cloud. The release was a culmination of a longstanding partnership between the two firms.

“Teradata has been working with Microsoft for many, many years. We’ve had products on Azure Cloud; we’ve also launched some new products on Azure Cloud,” said Daniel Spurling (pictured, right), senior vice president of product engineering at Teradata. “Imagine if we opened up our internal engineering and Microsoft’s engineering together and then went and built something? That was where we really spawned what we are launching here, which is our Ask.AI Copilot for Teradata.”

Spurling spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Rebecca Knight and Rob Strechay at Possible 2023, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Eduardo Kassner (left), chief data officer and general manager of the customer success data and AI team for the U.S. Software and Digital Platform organization at Microsoft, and they discussed key features of the new offering from a collaboration between the two companies. (* Disclosure below.)

Building reliability

Teradata’s work with Microsoft illustrates the gravitational pull that AI has exerted on the business world since the general release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT last year. In deploying Ask.ai, the two companies focused on building a structure around the offering that would support enterprise needs.

“The misconceptions are you can do everything with generative AI. It’s a shiny new object; that’s all you need,” Kassner said. “That’s not true. It’s privacy, security and compliance, performance, cost management, and the most important one, that the system is reliable, that the questions that you ask of it are actually what you’re expecting to hear back. These are the five things that we had to address really well.”

The announcement with Microsoft is apparently just the start of a set of AI-related releases, and Spurling hinted there is more in the works for Teradata.

“We have played deep in this space, and with that focus, we have said, we will enable customers to be able to build the most complex, massive, at-scale AI solutions,” Spurling said. “We’ve got a lot that we’re working on right now that we cannot wait to talk about in the future.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Possible 2023:

(* Disclosure: Microsoft Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Microsoft nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE