World's largest industrial LLM revealed!
Saudi oil giant develops 250B parameter industrial large language model
#Saudi #LLMs - Aramco, Saudi Arabia's national oil company, has announced a 250 billion parameter large language model, which is says it the world's largest industrial LLM. Called METABRAIN, the AI model was trained on 7 trillion data tokens of public and internal Aramco data, based on about 90 years of data. The oil giant promises to deliver a 1 trillion parameter version of the model by the end of 2024.
SO WHAT? - Aramco has been investing heavily in building AI and data science capabilities in-house, via joint ventures and in partnership with different organisations around the world. These moves include launching a joint venture with Internet of Things software company Cognite to create CNTXT, to provide digital transformation services in Saudi Arabia. More recently Aramco has partnered with Groq, which develops AI chips for running AI models called LPUs (language processing units). The new METABRAIN 250B is the biggest and most significant new AI product that the Saudi oil giant has announced.
Key details of the announcement
Aramco has developed a 250 billion parameter large language model, which it calls aramcoMETABRAIN, trained on 7 trillion data tokens of public and internal data. The group will create a 1 trillion parameter version of the LLM by the end of 2024.
Aramco says that its investment in the development of aramcoMETABRAIN is a strategic one, and this is borne out by the sheer size of the model. The oil giant plans to use the AI model to power disruptive, cognitive applications across its businesses.
The decision was taken to develop the industrial grade LLM in order to deliver domain-specific benefits to the business and manage the risks associated with the technology. The oil group hopes that its strategic commitment to Generative AI will transform the way its organisation works, raising both productivity and driving growth.
According to the Aramco CEO Amin Nasser, METABRAIN is helping upstream operations to analyse drilling plans and geological data, analysing historical drilling times versus costs, and recommending well options.
For Aramco's downstream business, METABRAIN will have the capability to provide precise forecasts for refined products, including pricing trends, market dynamics, and geopolitical insights.
Meanwhile, its team of more than 80 AI professionals and data scientists are working on AI models that provide forecasts, optimise performance, minimise downtime, and increasingly support data-driven decision-making across its organisation.
The group formed its new subsidiary Aramco Digital last year to take the lead on AI development and drive digital transformation across the organisation.
Aramco also introduced its Saudi Accelerated Innovation Lab (SAIL) to the LEAP audience, which was launched in November to incubate digital R&D, build new digital solutions, create new ventures, and invest in new technologies.
ZOOM OUT - Few organisations worldwide can match the digital infrastructure that Aramco has at its disposal, which includes two of the three largest supercomputers in the Arab world, nor the budget that the oil giant has been able to dedicate to AI development. With a wide variety of partnerships across Saudi Arabia’s government, non-government and commercial sectors, the impact of this massive Generative AI programme will be felt far outside of Aramco itself.
IMO - While the size and scale of Aramco’s new METABRAIN large language model is certainly impressive, the vision and leadership that backed this development - relying on a still, very new technology - is awesome! Rather than paddle in the shallows of incremental improvements, testing a variety of domain-specific models on finite problems, Aramco has launched itself right into the sea of disruption, to bring about wholesale change across its entire business. Whatever happens, this will yield the case studies that will help to define the future of the oil and gas industry, and perhaps other industries too.