Oracle’s Larry Ellison: Global tech race for the future

Speaking at Oracle's 'CloudWorld' event, Ellison emphasized that while striving to develop artificial intelligence (AI) for a brighter future, it's essential to acknowledge and address the associated risks, as is common with any emerging technology

Las Vegas: Larry Ellison, the 79-year-old CTO and Co-founder of Cloud major Oracle, says there is a “worldwide race to build what comes next,” as technology changes very fast.

Ellison, while addressing the keynote at Oracle’s flagship ‘CloudWorld’ event here, said that to build artificial intelligence (AI) for a better future, it will come with associated risks like all new technologies.

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“Generative AI raised concerns about governments who talked about regulating it. Even the Hollywood Writers’ strike is partially based on them being concerned about their jobs.. who’s going to write their next script, is it going to be the guy you know or some computer you don’t.

“Everyone wants to know what comes next.. what I think comes next is a worldwide race to build what comes next,” the tech mogul told the gathering.

Generative AI is changing everything and “it is certainly changing everything at Oracle”.

“About a year ago, OpenAI demonstrated ChatGPT and much to the shock of the people who developed it, the baby talks… the developers did not expect that.

“ChatGPT supplied answers, it engaged conversations, it was a big surprise for the people at ChatGPT, AI professionals and for the entire world. It captured all our imagination,” Ellison noted.

The Oracle CTO termed Generative AI as “transformational, a breakthrough and a revolution”.

He made some announcements and one of the key ones was ‘MultiCloud’ – a collaboration between Microsoft Cloud and Oracle Cloud.

Under this partnership, Oracle hardware and software will be installed in Microsoft Azure data centers; Oracle databases will be on Exadata hardware; fastest network with the usage of microsecond connection from Oracle database to Azure Services; and provision of Oracle database services from Azure portal.

Ellison also reminisced about a conversation that he had with Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, during which they agreed on Cloud being open and interconnected.

“Customers already use multiple Cloud services. Once customers choose what they want, it is our job to provide them a seamless service. There shouldn’t be a wall between Microsoft Cloud and Oracle Cloud. They should be seamlessly interoperable,” said Ellison.

“We started experimenting on this in 2019 and we got a lot of customers. We then decided to take this forward and make it completely transparent,” he added.