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NetApp receives Artificial Intelligence Excellence award

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Mike-McNamara
Mike McNamara
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On March 22, the Business Intelligence Group announced that NetApp® AI was named a winner in its Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards program. NetApp AI won the award for natural language processing (NLP). The Business Intelligence Group was founded with the mission of recognizing true talent and superior performance in the business world. Unlike other industry award programs, these programs are judged by business executives who have experience and knowledge. The organization’s unique proprietary scoring system selectively measures performance across multiple business domains and rewards companies whose achievements stand above those of their peers.

Natural language processing

Doing NLP right requires an insane amount of data. Try to imagine every word ever spoken and you’re almost there. NLP has to be able to process, understand, and reference speech input against an immense library of data to create an intelligible response in milliseconds. This requirement is especially difficult given the complexity of human language, which is full of rules and exceptions and becomes even more difficult when you consider the nuances of idioms, sarcasm, and humor. Industry-specific models can also require specific information about a particular domain, company, or products. That’s why the size of conversational AI models has grown to millions or billions of parameters. Typically, the more data, the more accurate the model. Training models of this size can take weeks of compute time and require the best-of-the-best machine learning and deep learning frameworks.

According to Gartner, by 2022, up to 70% of people will be interacting with conversational AI platforms on a daily basis. For real-time natural language processing, data must be able to flow quickly and freely throughout each step of the data pipeline. With  NetApp ONTAP® AI powered by NVIDIA DGX systems and NetApp cloud-connected all-flash storage systems, massive, state-of-the-art language models can be trained and optimized to perform inference rapidly.

NetApp Awards: Artificial Intelligence

Since 2019, NetApp AI has won many AI awards and recognitions:

Learn more

To discover how to adapt as your industry advances, visit the NetApp natural language processing for AI page.

Mike McNamara

Mike McNamara is a senior leader of product and solution marketing at NetApp with 25 years of data management and data storage marketing experience. Before joining NetApp over 10 years ago, Mike worked at Adaptec, EMC and HP. Mike was a key team leader driving the launch of the industry’s first cloud-connected AI/ML solution (NetApp), unified scale-out and hybrid cloud storage system and software (NetApp), iSCSI and SAS storage system and software (Adaptec), and Fibre Channel storage system (EMC CLARiiON). In addition to his past role as marketing chairperson for the Fibre Channel Industry Association, he is a member of the Ethernet Technology Summit Conference Advisory Board, a member of the Ethernet Alliance, a regular contributor to industry journals, and a frequent speaker at events. Mike also published a book through FriesenPress titled "Scale-Out Storage - The Next Frontier in Enterprise Data Management", and was listed as a top 50 B2B product marketer to watch by Kapos.

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