Aramco training over 6,000 AI developers
Large-scale education and training initiatives support digital transformation
#Saudi #LEAP25 - Aramco, one of the world’s leading integrated energy and chemicals companies, is training more than 6, 000 AI developers across the company, according to comments made by Ahmad Al-Khowaiter, Aramco EVP of Technology & Innovation at LEAP25 in Riyadh. The energy giant is working with some of the world's leading institutions such as Caltech, Imperial College, and KAUST, to put hundreds of employees through advanced degree courses. Al-Khowaiter also announced the development of Plant METABRAIN, a new time series transformer model trained on huge time series data sets, to model the real-time processes that underpin Aramco’s operations.
SO WHAT? - Aramco is investing billions of dollars in digital technologies, software and infrastructure to transform its global business. Leveraging real-time data and 90 years of historical data, it is also trailblazing the development of industrial LLMs and other transformer models. The conglomerate is pioneering the development and implementation of AI across all aspects of its upstream and downstream operations, therefore there is a significant requirement for human skills and knowledge. So no surprise that Aramco’s AI education programme is one of the largest in the world.
Here are some key points mentioned by the Aramco EVP at LEAP25:
Aramco is training more than 6, 000 AI developers across the company, according to comments made by Ahmad Al-Khowaiter, Aramco EVP of Technology & Innovation speaking on the main stage at LEAP25 in Riyadh today.
With internal and external education and training programmes, Aramco is working closely with institutions such as Caltech, Imperial College, and KAUST, to put hundreds of employees through advanced degree courses.
The energy giant also leverages engineers, scientists and operators to work with AI developers to develop and train new AI models, making them more productive, robust and reliable.
Last March Aramco announced the development of METABRAIN, a 250 billion parameter large language model, trained on 7 trillion data tokens of public and internal data. Today, the EVP of Technology confirmed that a 1 trillion parameter version of the LLM remains in development.
Meanwhile, Aramco has developed Plant METABRAIN, a new time series transformer model trained on huge time series data sets to model the real-time processes that underpin Aramco’s operations.
Plant METABRAIN is able to provide actionable insight in real-time to operators, engineers and scientists. Requiring minimal user input, the model can help anticipate demand, optimise operations, predict product qualities and maximise production efficiency.
Al-Khowaiter also confirmed that Aramco has recently doubled its data centre computing power and increased its data storage capacity to 1, 500 petabytes. The group has also added a number of NVIDIA SuperPODs to complement its existing high-performance computing capacity.
Read more about Aramco’s AI effort:
Groq opens EMEA's largest AI compute centre (Middle East AI News)
World’s 1st industrial distributed cloud deployed in KSA (Middle East AI News)
Aramco Digital and WWT form strategic AI partnership (Middle East AI News)
World's largest industrial LLM revealed! (Middle East AI News)