The OCI AI Portfolio

Oracle University Podcast

Oracle has been actively focusing on bringing AI to the enterprise at every layer of its tech stack, be it SaaS apps, AI services, infrastructure, or data.

In this episode, hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with senior instructors Hemant Gahankari and Himanshu Raj, discuss OCI AI and Machine Learning services. They also go over some key OCI Data Science concepts and responsible AI principles.

Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/learning-path/become-an-oci-ai-foundations-associate-2023/127177

Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/

X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu

Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Himanshu Raj, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.

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Episode Transcript:

00:00

Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started!

00:26

Lois: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor.

Nikita: Hey everyone! In our last episode, we dove into Generative AI and Language Learning Models.

Lois: Yeah, that was an interesting one. But today, we’re going to discuss the AI and machine learning services offered by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and we’ll look at the OCI AI infrastructure.

Nikita: I’m also going to try and squeeze in a couple of questions on a topic I’m really keen about, which is responsible AI. To take us through all of this, we have two of our colleagues, Hemant Gahankari and Himanshu Raj. Hemant is a Senior Principal OCI Instructor and Himanshu is a Senior Instructor on AI/ML. So, let’s get started!

01:16

Lois: Hi Hemant! We’re so excited to have you here! We know that Oracle has really been focusing on bringing AI to the enterprise at every layer of our stack.

Hemant: It all begins with data and infrastructure layers. OCI AI services consume data, and AI services, in turn, are consumed by applications.

This approach involves extensive investment from infrastructure to SaaS applications. Generative AI and massive scale models are the more recent steps. Oracle AI is the portfolio of cloud services for helping organizations use the data they may have for the business-specific uses.

Business applications consume AI and ML services. The foundation of AI services and ML services is data. AI services contain pre-built models for specific uses. Some of the AI services are pre-trained, and some can be additionally trained by the customer with their own data.

AI services can be consumed by calling the API for the service, passing in the data to be processed, and the service returns a result. There is no infrastructure to be managed for using AI services.

02:37

Nikita: How do I access OCI AI services?

Hemant: OCI AI services provide multiple methods for access. The most common method is the OCI Console. The OCI Console provides an easy to use, browser-based interface that enables access to notebook sessions and all the features of all the data science, as well as AI services.

The REST API provides access to service functionality but requires programming expertise. And API reference is provided in the product documentation. OCI also provides programming language SDKs for Java, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, .Net, Go, and Ruby. The command line interface provides both quick access and full functionality without the need for scripting.

03:31

Lois: Hemant, what are the types of OCI AI services that are available?

Hemant: OCI AI services is a collection of services with pre-built machine learning models that make it easier for developers to build a variety of business applications. The models can also be custom trained for more accurate business results. The different services provided are digital assistant, language, vision, speech, document understanding, anomaly detection.

04:03

Lois: I know we’re going to talk about them in more detail in the next episode, but can you introduce us to OCI Language, Vision, and Speech?

Hemant: OCI Language allows you to perform sophisticated text analysis at scale. Using the pre-trained and custom models, you can process unstructured text to extract insights without data science expertise. Pre-trained models include language detection, sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction, text classification, named entity recognition, and personal identifiable information detection.

Custom models can be trained for named entity recognition and text classification with domain-specific data sets. In text translation, natural machine translation is used to translate text across numerous languages.

Using OCI Vision, you can upload images to detect and classify objects in them. Pre-trained models and custom models are supported. In image analysis, pre-trained models perform object detection, image classification, and optical character recognition. In image analysis, custom models can perform custom object detection by detecting the location of custom objects in an image and providing a bounding box. The OCI Speech service is used to convert media files to readable texts that's stored in JSON and SRT format. Speech enables you to easily convert media files containing human speech into highly exact text transcriptions.

05:52

Nikita: That’s great. And what about document understanding and anomaly detection?

Hemant: Using OCI document understanding, you can upload documents to detect and classify text and objects in them. You can process individual files or batches of documents. In OCR, document understanding can detect and recognize text in a document. In text extraction, document understanding provides the word level and line level text, and the bounding box, coordinates of where the text is found.

In key value extraction, document understanding extracts a predefined list of key value pairs of information from receipts, invoices, passports, and driver IDs. In table extraction, document understanding extracts content in tabular format, maintaining the row and column relationship of cells. In document classification, the document understanding classifies documents into different types.

The OCI Anomaly Detection service is a service that analyzes large volume of multivariate or univariate time series data. The Anomaly Detection service increases the reliability of businesses by monitoring their critical assets and detecting anomalies early with high precision. Anomaly Detection is the identification of rare items, events, or observations in data that differ significantly from the expectation.

07:34

Nikita: Where is Anomaly Detection most useful?

Hemant: The Anomaly Detection service is designed to help with analyzing large amounts of data and identifying the anomalies at the earliest possible time with maximum accuracy. Different sectors, such as utility, oil and gas, transportation, manufacturing, telecommunications, banking, and insurance use Anomaly Detection service for their day-to-day activities.

08:02

Lois: Ok.. and the first OCI AI service you mentioned was digital assistant…

Hemant: Oracle Digital Assistant is a platform that allows you to create and deploy digital assistants, which are AI driven interfaces that help users accomplish a variety of tasks with natural language conversations. When a user engages with the Digital Assistant, the Digital Assistant evaluates the user input and routes the conversation to and from the appropriate skills. Digital Assistant greets the user upon access. Upon user requests, list what it can do and provide entry points into the given skills. It routes explicit user requests to the appropriate skills. And it also handles interruptions to flows and disambiguation. It also handles requests to exit the bot.

09:00

Nikita: Excellent! Let’s bring Himanshu in to tell us about machine learning services. Hi Himanshu! Let’s talk about OCI Data Science. Can you tell us a bit about it?

Himanshu: OCI Data Science is the cloud service focused on serving the data scientist throughout the full machine learning life cycle with support for Python and open source.

The service has many features, such as model catalog, projects, JupyterLab notebook, model deployment, model training, management, model explanation, open source libraries, and AutoML.

09:35 Lois: Himanshu, what are the core principles of OCI Data Science?

Himanshu: There are three core principles of OCI Data Science. The first one, accelerated. The first principle is about accelerating the work of the individual data scientist. OCI Data Science provides data scientists with open source libraries along with easy access to a range of compute power without having to manage any infrastructure. It also includes Oracle's own library to help streamline many aspects of their work. The second principle is collaborative. It goes beyond an individual data scientist’s productivity to enable data science teams to work together. This is done through the sharing of assets, reducing duplicative work, and putting reproducibility and auditability of models for collaboration and risk management.

Third is enterprise grade. That means it's integrated with all the OCI Security and access protocols. The underlying infrastructure is fully managed. The customer does not have to think about provisioning compute and storage. And the service handles all the maintenance, patching, and upgrades so user can focus on solving business problems with data science.

10:50

Nikita: Let’s drill down into the specifics of OCI Data Science. So far, we know it’s cloud service to rapidly build, train, deploy, and manage machine learning models. But who can use it? Where is it? And how is it used?

Himanshu: It serves data scientists and data science teams throughout the full machine learning life cycle.

Users work in a familiar JupyterLab notebook interface, where they write Python code. And how it is used? So users preserve their models in the model catalog and deploy their models to a managed infrastructure.

11:25

Lois: Walk us through some of the key terminology that’s used.

Himanshu: Some of the important product terminology of OCI Data Science are projects. The projects are containers that enable data science teams to organize their work. They represent collaborative work spaces for organizing and documenting data science assets, such as notebook sessions and models.

Note that tenancy can have as many projects as needed without limits. Now, this notebook session is where the data scientists work. Notebook sessions provide a JupyterLab environment with pre-installed open source libraries and the ability to add others. Notebook sessions are interactive coding environment for building and training models.

Notebook sessions run in a managed infrastructure and the user can select CPU or GPU, the compute shape, and amount of storage without having to do any manual provisioning. The other important feature is Conda environment. It's an open source environment and package management system and was created for Python programs.

12:33

Nikita: What is a Conda environment used for?

Himanshu: It is used in the service to quickly install, run, and update packages and their dependencies. Conda easily creates, saves, loads, and switches between environments in your notebooks sessions.

12:46

Nikita: Earlier, you spoke about the support for Python in OCI Data Science. Is there a dedicated library?

Himanshu: Oracle's Accelerated Data Science ADS SDK is a Python library that is included as part of OCI Data Science. ADS has many functions and objects that automate or simplify the steps in the data science workflow, including connecting to data, exploring, and visualizing data. Training a model with AutoML, evaluating models, and explaining models. In addition, ADS provides a simple interface to access the data science service mode model catalog and other OCI services, including object storage.

13:24

Lois: I also hear a lot about models. What are models?

Himanshu: Models define a mathematical representation of your data and business process. You create models in notebooks, sessions, inside projects.

13:36

Lois: What are some other important terminologies related to models?

Himanshu: The next terminology is model catalog. The model catalog is a place to store, track, share, and manage models. The model catalog is a centralized and managed repository of model artifacts. A stored model includes metadata about the provenance of the model, including Git-related information and the script. Our notebook used to push the model to the catalog. Models stored in the model catalog can be shared across members of a team, and they can be loaded back into a notebook session.

The next one is model deployments. Model deployments allow you to deploy models stored in the model catalog as HTTP endpoints on managed infrastructure.

14:24

Lois: So, how do you operationalize these models?

Himanshu: Deploying machine learning models as web applications, HTTP API endpoints, serving predictions in real time is the most common way to operationalize models. HTTP endpoints or the API endpoints are flexible and can serve requests for the model predictions. Data science jobs enable you to define and run a repeatable machine learning tasks on fully managed infrastructure.

Nikita: Thanks for that, Himanshu.

14:57

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15:25

Nikita: Welcome back! The Oracle AI Stack consists of AI services and machine learning services, and these services are built using AI infrastructure. So, let’s move on to that. Hemant, what are the components of OCI AI Infrastructure? Hemant: OCI AI Infrastructure is mainly composed of GPU-based instances. Instances can be virtual machines or bare metal machines. High performance cluster networking that allows instances to communicate to each other. Super clusters are a massive network of GPU instances with multiple petabytes per second of bandwidth. And a variety of fully managed storage options from a single byte to exabytes without upfront provisioning are also available.

16:14

Lois: Can we explore each of these components a little more? First, tell us, why do we need GPUs?

Hemant: ML and AI needs lots of repetitive computations to be made on huge amounts of data. Parallel computing on GPUs is designed for many processes at the same time. A GPU is a piece of hardware that is incredibly good in performing computations. GPU has thousands of lightweight cores, all working on their share of data in parallel. This gives them the ability to crunch through extremely large data set at tremendous speed.

16:54

Nikita: And what are the GPU instances offered by OCI?

Hemant: GPU instances are ideally suited for model training and inference. Bare metal and virtual machine compute instances powered by NVIDIA GPUs H100, A100, A10, and V100 are made available by OCI.

17:14

Nikita: So how do we choose what to train from these different GPU options?

Hemant: For large scale AI training, data analytics, and high performance computing, bare metal instances BM 8 X NVIDIA H100 and BM 8 X NVIDIA A100 can be used.

These provide up to nine times faster AI training and 30 times higher acceleration for AI inferencing. The other bare metal and virtual machines are used for small AI training, inference, streaming, gaming, and virtual desktop infrastructure.

17:53

Lois: And why would someone choose the OCI AI stack over its counterparts?

Hemant: Oracle offers all the features and is the most cost effective option when compared to its counterparts.

For example, BM GPU 4.8 version 2 instance costs just $4 per hour and is used by many customers.

Superclusters are a massive network with multiple petabytes per second of bandwidth. It can scale up to 4,096 OCI bare metal instances with 32,768 GPUs.

We also have a choice of bare metal A100 or H100 GPU instances, and we can select a variety of storage options, like object store, or block store, or even file system. For networking speeds, we can reach 1,600 GB per second with A100 GPUs and 3,200 GB per second with H100 GPUs.

With OCI storage, we can select local SSD up to four NVMe drives, block storage up to 32 terabytes per volume, object storage up to 10 terabytes per object, file systems up to eight exabyte per file system. OCI File system employs five replicated storage located in different fault domains to provide redundancy for resilient data protection.

HPC file systems, such as BeeGFS and many others are also offered. OCI HPC file systems are available on Oracle Cloud Marketplace and make it easy to deploy a variety of high performance file servers.

19:50

Lois: I think a discussion on AI would be incomplete if we don’t talk about responsible AI. We’re using AI more and more every day, but can we actually trust it?

Hemant: For us to trust AI, it must be driven by ethics that guide us as well.

Nikita: And do we have some principles that guide the use of AI? Hemant: AI should be lawful, complying with all applicable laws and regulations. AI should be ethical, that is it should ensure adherence to ethical principles and values that we uphold as humans. And AI should be robust, both from a technical and social perspective. Because even with the good intentions, AI systems can cause unintentional harm.

AI systems do not operate in a lawless world. A number of legally binding rules at national and international level apply or are relevant to the development, deployment, and use of AI systems today. The law not only prohibits certain actions but also enables others, like protecting rights of minorities or protecting environment. Besides horizontally applicable rules, various domain-specific rules exist that apply to particular AI applications. For instance, the medical device regulation in the health care sector.

In AI context, equality entails that the systems’ operations cannot generate unfairly biased outputs. And while we adopt AI, citizens right should also be protected.

21:30

Lois: Ok, but how do we derive AI ethics from these?

Hemant: There are three main principles. AI should be used to help humans and allow for oversight. It should never cause physical or social harm. Decisions taken by AI should be transparent and fair, and also should be explainable. AI that follows the AI ethical principles is responsible AI.

So if we map the AI ethical principles to responsible AI requirements, these will be like, AI systems should follow human-centric design principles and leave meaningful opportunity for human choice. This means securing human oversight. AI systems and environments in which they operate must be safe and secure, they must be technically robust, and should not be open to malicious use.

The development, and deployment, and use of AI systems must be fair, ensuring equal and just distribution of both benefits and costs. AI should be free from unfair bias and discrimination. Decisions taken by AI to the extent possible should be explainable to those directly and indirectly affected.

23:01

Nikita: This is all great, but what does a typical responsible AI implementation process look like?

Hemant: First, a governance needs to be put in place. Second, develop a set of policies and procedures to be followed. And once implemented, ensure compliance by regular monitoring and evaluation.

Lois: And this is all managed by developers?

Hemant: Typical roles that are involved in the implementation cycles are developers, deployers, and end users of the AI.

23:35

Nikita: Can we talk about AI specifically in health care? How do we ensure that there is fairness and no bias?

Hemant: AI systems are only as good as the data that they are trained on. If that data is predominantly from one gender or racial group, the AI systems might not perform as well on data from other groups.

24:00

Lois: Yeah, and there’s also the issue of ensuring transparency, right?

Hemant: AI systems often make decisions based on complex algorithms that are difficult for humans to understand. As a result, patients and health care providers can have difficulty trusting the decisions made by the AI. AI systems must be regularly evaluated to ensure that they are performing as intended and not causing harm to patients.

24:29

Nikita: Thank you, Hemant and Himanshu, for this really insightful session. If you’re interested in learning more about the topics we discussed today, head on over to mylearn.oracle.com and search for the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure AI Foundations course.

Lois: That’s right, Niki. You’ll find demos that you watch as well as skill checks that you can attempt to better your understanding. In our next episode, we’ll get into the OCI AI Services we discussed today and talk about them in more detail. Until then, this is Lois Houston…

Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off!

25:05

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