For a company focused on hardware, the ability of Dell Technologies Inc. to leverage and enable emerging artificial intelligence technologies such as ChatGPT may seem like a stretch — but not to founder and Chief Executive Officer Michael Dell.

“There is a misunderstanding that AI is just in ChatGPT,” Dell (pictured, right) said in an interview today with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, adding that the company has thousands of projects to apply AI for customers. “For a long time, we have had AI embedded in our systems. These large language models are a big leap forward, and it’s a big opportunity.”

Dell spoke to theCUBE host Dave Vellante (left) during an interview today following a second day of keynotes at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. He talked about the potential of the generative AI behind ChatGPT and other new AI models, how they will need to be regulated and how new products introduced at Dell Tech World aim to help AI and other data-heavy workloads succeed at the network edge. (*Disclosure below)

Reaching the APEX

At the event, the company introduced a raft of new features and services, led Monday by a number of announcements for its APEX portfolio of hardware and software provided as cloud services. They included offerings focused on helping enterprises more easily procure data center hardware for hybrid computing as well as manage cloud-based storage clusters and employee devices such as personal computers.

And today, Dell added more new services, including Project Helix, a joint initiative with Nvidia Corp. to help companies run generative artificial intelligence software in their own on-premises data centers using Dell servers and management tools. It also beefed up security offerings with Project Fort Zero, the latest in a series of its zero-trust networking services and products.

Dell outlined how those announcements are aimed at helping customers manage their systems and workloads under a common cloud-friendly framework.

“Ultimately every customer is reaching the conclusion that it’s multicloud,” Dell said. But customers can’t afford to manage multiple platforms individually. “You want all those … to look like a single system.”

That’s true when it comes to cybersecurity as well, which Dell said his company aims to make “super-easy for customers” to make their security tools work together better. “We’re convening the whole ecosystem of all the leading security companies in the world to integrate all that,” he said. “Security has to be embedded in and built in rather than bolted on.”

Generative AI, of course

Dell, whose career and company spanned seminal eras of technology from the PC to the internet, thinks AI could be on par with them.

“It’s an enormous unlock of all this data,” he said. “Large language models are going to accelerate that great unlock. Data is at the center of everything that is interesting and important, and data is the fuel.”

The CEO believes Dell Technologies has a central role in enabling companies leap into the new era of generative AI, since he thinks they must run those models — a process called inference — mostly at the network edge to reduce latency, cost, and privacy and regulatory concerns.

“The vast majority, 80% to 90% of the servers at the edge, will be for inference,” Dell said. That means that “a substantial portion of the growth will be in the edge. We see that as the big evolutionary path.”

At the same time, Dell acknowledges that there will need to be guardrails and regulation to reduce the likelihood that these new AI models, which sometimes can provide wrong information quite confidently and could be used by nefarious actors for sowing misinformation or hacking.

“There will be regulation,” he said. But it won’t be easy to implement, because it’s software, and software is inherently difficult to regulate. Dell suggested there may need to be limits on who can get the most powerful compute capabilities.

Next-generation businesses

For all that, Dell remains optimistic that AI and other technologies will eventually result in more economic opportunities.

“If you get out of the anxiety of the moment… what’s really likely to happen in the next five years, 10 years, 20 years … will be a huge positive impact,” he said. “We have to protect agains really bad outcomes and put the guardrails in place. But technology is going to drive enormous progress, and the economy will grow a lot faster as a result.”

Indeed, Dell thinks we’re starting to see that now. “You already see a proliferation of companies that are using these tools to create next-generation businesses. They couldn’t be created a year ago.”

For Dell’s part, if he were starting a business today out of college, he’d be looking at healthcare and the biosciences, given that these technologies have been driving innovations such as new vaccines. “That would be the kind of thing I’d be attracted to,” he said.

Here’s the full video of theCUBE’s Michael Dell interview, and there’s much more coverage of Dell Technologies World this week on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell Technologies World. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE