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There’s a real buzz here at the Venetian today ahead of the morning keynote and we can expect another packed conference hall ahead of things kicking off!
In the meantime, why not catch up on all of our coverage from Dell Technologies World so far? There’s more to come, so be sure to keep your eyes peeled for all of our rolling coverage.
• Dell doubles down on Nvidia partnership with ‘AI factories’ and models at the edge
• Dell Technologies expands AI ecosystem with Microsoft, Hugging Face support
• All our predictions for Dell Technologies World 2024 (let us know how we’re doing so far…)
So, what can we expect to see at the day-two keynote this morning?
Today’s session is titled ‘Making AI Real‘, so get ready for a hands-on session with speakers running us through practical, real-world examples of AI innovation.
Chief operating officer Jeff Clarke will be leading this morning’s session, and he’ll be joined by a host of Dell customers to give us a glimpse into how they’re delivering operational improvements through AI tools.
Updates to the AI Factory service weren’t the only headline-grabbing announcements, however.
Dell is very bullish on edge computing right now, and the company is focusing heavily on bolstering its capabilities in this regard. Yesterday we saw five new AI PCs unveiled, which Dell said are finely tuned for inferencing AI models at the edge without placing significant strain on battery life or performance.
AI PCs certainly are all the rage at the moment, as Microsoft unveiled its own new Copilot+ AI PC brand at its Build conference this week.
Yesterday’s opening keynote with founder and CEO, Michael Dell, set the stage for an exciting few days here in Las Vegas.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made an appearance to discuss the close ties between Dell and Nvidia, and we had a couple of big announcements here regarding the ‘AI Factories’ work ongoing between the two firms.
New features are coming to Dell AI Factory with Nvidia. This is an end-to-end solution for enterprise AI deployment that aims to streamline the development and roll-out of AI tools.
Moving forward, Huang revealed the duo aim to forge closer ties and draw upon their combined software and hardware capabilities to further expand the service.
This includes new server options for customers that leverage Nvidia’s latest chips, as well as greater support for the Nvidia AI Enterprise platform.
“We are at the dawn of a new age of cognition,” Dell says, thanking his guests today. To illustrate the point and emphasize the potential AI holds for future generations, Dell is joined onstage by McDermott, Hwang, and Huang alongside younger workers representing the next generation of the sector.
And with that, the day-one keynote is finished. Stay tuned for all the latest on the ground throughout the event.
Moving on, Dell notes that there are clear barriers to AI adoption. For one, we need ethical AI development, and to address enterprise concerns.
Green data centers, powered by renewable energy sources and cooled more efficiently are at the core of responsibly and sustainably adopting AI, Dell says.
He also says that governments must adopt an ‘AI-first’ approach and that Dell stands ready to support the public sector in this aim. If we don’t invest in AI, Dell says, we’ll miss out on benefits for future generations.
To demonstrate this, we’re now being shown a short clip about what Dell calls ‘AI for human progress’. Examples include AI for healthcare and the future generations using AI to solve issues in their communities, as well as students leveraging chatbots to train for job interviews.
What does Huang say we need to do going forward?
“One: modernize a trillion dollars of the world’s data centers. Two: build these AI factories, for the rest of the hundred trillion dollar industries. Easy peasy.”
Huang describes Dell AI Factories with Nvidia as “the largest AI go-to-market in history,” to applause from the audience.
“Only Dell has the ability to build computer networking, storage, integrated with incredible software whether you want it to be air-cooled, liquid-cooled,” Huang adds.
All of this revolves around seven new announcements for Dell AI Factory with Nvidia, including new Nvidia NIM microservices and hardware.
At the heart of this is the Dell PowerEdge XE9680L, a new liquid-cooled server rack that can host up to 72 of Nvidia’s flagship Blackwell GPUs.
“Only at Dell World do you talk sexy like that,” Huang quips, prompting loud laughter throughout the auditorium. On a more serious note, Huang says the aim here is to make AI as easy as possible, even when “giant supercomputers” are necessary for running the latest AI workloads.
‘AI factories’ with Dell and Nvidia
“The early movers are making massive bets,” Dell says, noting that we’re at the start of a new industrial revolution. But don’t take it from him, he urges – take it from the man he’s quoting, Jensen Huang founder and CEO, Nvidia.
“Instead of just producing software, we’re now producing intelligence, formulated in the form of tokens,” Huang says. While the previous industrial revolution focused on producing software and the one before that producing electricity, he says, we’re now directly manufacturing intelligence.
The bottom line here is that Dell and Nvidia are doubling down on the importance of AI. Huang underlines the importance of “generative AI factories,” which can be used to totally reinvent a firm’s operational model.
“Every company at its foundation is intelligence,” Huang adds, noting that “every company will be an AI company”.
We’ve heard a lot of praise for Michael Dell already, but Dell is now taking time to give credit to Dell’s partners and customers across the sector.
“We are getting faster, stronger, smarter to be by your side for both a sprint and a marathon,” Dell says. The demand for AI is already touching every industry and organization, Dell says, but notes that AI models will vary by use case.
LLMs, for example, can create real value as chatbots for customer service but aren’t so useful in a manufacturing context. For this, other models such as vision and multimodal AI will be necessary, he adds.
Small models also have a powerful role to play, Dell adds. As predicted, we’re hearing more about the smaller, edge-capable LLMs now.
Leveraging AI on premises with Dell
But how does all this benefit customers? Here to give a personal example is Sungwoo Hwang president and CEO, Samsung SDS.
“Our enterprise customers are very interested in using hyperautomation using LLMs, but they’re worried about security because they have to put their proprietary information into LLMs, their company’s core data,” Hwang says.
Hwang says Dell has helped Samsung SDS in a meaningful way by providing its customers with low-latency AI solutions that are also inherently secure, being hosted on premises through Dell infrastructure.
“Dell AI Factory is expected to contribute to the establishment of data sovreingty for companies by enabling strong data security and customized AI service deployment,” Hwang adds, praising Dell for its approach.
AI at the edge
Dell is keen to move onto edge computing, with a landmark five new AI PCs announced today.
“We are using an advanced architecture with a CPU, a GPU, and an NPU,” in each laptop, Dell says.
Dell claims that these devices are ideal for inferencing AI models at the edge without cutting into battery life.
All of this ties into Dell’s AI ecosystem, we’re told, which also includes open source AI models, services around retrieval augmented generation, and connections with Azure, DataBricks, IBM, and Snowflake.
If that sounds like a flurry of sudden announcements, it is – Dell almost said it all in one breath. We’ve been promised more details on all that in tomorrow’s keynote, which we’ll also be covering live.
Dell’s AI factories for customers
Before we get there, Dell is running us through some key stats for enterprise AI adoption. Running inference on LLMs on premises, Dell says, can be 75% more cost effective versus the public cloud. This is what Dell is looking to empower through its ‘AI factory’ approach, an end-to-end ecosystem for AI training, inference, and tuning.
“Data has been, and is, at the center of everything: it’s the rocket fuel,” he says.
“So let’s go where the data is. And no company in the world has provided more data storage capacity than Dell.”
On this note Dell has today announced PowerStore Prime, a new NAS storage solution for 66% improved performance through flash storage and secure snapshots for data protection.
Joining this is the PowerScale F910, described by Dell as a product that “feeds the beast of accelerated computing” with unstructured data.
The heart of today’s hardware announcements, however, is the PowerEdge XE9680. Dell says its specs include:
- Eight Nvidia GPUs
- 4TB/sec throughout
- 50% more GPU direct score access
To handle all the throughput for these AI workloads, Dell has partnered with Broadcom and Nvidia for networking fabrics.
So far, this has been a glowing 20 minutes of praise for Michael Dell, but light on announcements. But there’s every indication that’s about to change, with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang having already been mentioned several times.
In his closing remarks, McDermott praises Dell’s cloud infrastructure which he says provides the most reliable basis for enterprise processes and feeds directly into ServiceNow’s “unheard of” 99% retention rate.
“We use Dell’s servers to train our large language models, and we’re putting AI to work for people,” he says, giving the example of conversational self-service for better customer experience.
McDermott says he’s currently working with the Schwarz Group, Europe’s largest retailer, and notes that “one bad experience” for a customer makes them a third less likely to do business with your company ever again. AI can help here, he says, but it must also be done carefully.
“It’s a mess out there, ladies and gentlemen. When you have people swivelling between 17 different applications a day, no wonder they don’t want to come back to the office,” he says.
“What we do is put a clean pane of glass on the mess, we become the AI platform of business transformation.”
McDermott says with the right approach, organizations can achieve exponential benefits, but this will require a “human revolution” among the workforce driven by leaders.
Dell says that organizations can’t just look to “turn the wheel”, when it comes to adopting AI. Instead, they must reinvent and innovate to transform their entire organization to make the most of it.
To hear more about AI and the work Dell is doing with its partners to harness the technology, we’re now welcoming Bill McDermott, chairman and CEO, ServiceNow to the stage.
“ServiceNow is an idea, and just like how Michael Dell had his dream for Dell, I have mine for ServiceNow: to make sure it becomes the defining enterprise software company of the 21st century,” says McDermott.
“Every workflow, in every industry and every corner of the world will be reinvented wirh generative AI,” McDermott adds, implying that it changes our understanding of Moore’s Law.
Celebrating 40 years of Dell, we’re told, and Dell runs us through all the advancements of the past four decades including meaningful scientific breakthroughs and all the evolutions in computer hardware we’ve enjoyed.
This isn’t just any other Dell Technologies World – it’s the ‘AI edition’.
“All that progress that came before was really just the pre-game show,” Dell tells us, emphasizing that the tech sector is currently experiencing a pivotal moment in its history.
Dell says we’re “moving from computation to cognition, into the age of AI”.
The era of AI
And we’re off, beginning with a video montage recapping Dell’s year in the industry leaning heavily on AI with a montage based around the phrase “Make it X” e.g. “Make it creative”, “make it sustainable”.
Here to run us through all of this and more is Michael Dell, founder, chairman and CEO, Dell Technologies.
“We are thrilled to bring you some of the leading voices in technology today,” Dell begins, along with a promise of real customer stories. This ties into Dell’s stated goal in its keynote descriptions – namely, showing the concrete benefits of AI.
We’re in the keynote arena, which is filling up quickly. As is tech conference tradition, the soundtrack right now is an upbeat DJ set – the current song is a trance beat remix of Livin’ on a Prayer.
Dell is in an interesting spot with regards to AI, as it’s leaned heavily on its existing infrastructure and partnerships with the likes of Nvidia. It’s clear that this is set to continue throughout this year’s event, with Dell having announced its own AI Factory with Nvidia at this year’s Nvidia GTC conference – something the company is certain to follow-up on on its home turf.
Today’s keynote teases announcements that will help customers “transform your greatest ideas into action with AI, Multicloud, Edge, and more,” with representatives from relevant firms such as Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Sungwoo Hwang, president and CEO at Samsung SDS joining Dell on stage to explain more.
Any further detail Dell can give on lightweight LLMs – critical to its approach of bringing AI to the edge, including potentially AI on business laptops – will be key here.
We’ll be bringing you the latest news as it comes, so don’t go anywhere.
AI is set to be one of the main topics of today’s keynote and this is reflected in the visuals currently shown on the Las Vegas Sphere:
All night ahead of the conference, the Sphere has been cycling through animations related to Dell Technologies World 2024, as shown in the header image for this live blog.
Just under three hours to go until the conference kicks off with today’s keynote led by Michael Dell, CEO, chairman, and co-founder of Dell Technologies. The floor is already buzzing with attendees here at the Venetian – along with an Elvis impersonator – and the energy is only going to increase.
