What Is Artificial Intelligence

What Is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science concerned with creating self-learning systems that can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence. From self-driving cars to predicting the future, AI is revolutionizing the ways in which we can use data to shape our world.

AI can often sound like the stuff of science fiction. But in reality, it’s really just an extension of data science concepts that use algorithms to:

• Collect, process, and ingest data into a more useable format
• Learn from data by extracting useful insights 
• Automatically act on those insights to make better decisions

The AI we use today is classified as artificial narrow intelligence (ANI)—systems that can only perform specific tasks by approximating human-like intelligence capabilities such as speech and image processing. ANI systems aren’t capable of self-awareness, but they’re still incredibly powerful. There’s a lot you can accomplish with predictive analytics, natural language processing, and image recognition.

How is AI Reshaping the World of Data?

AI is one of the major driving forces behind the push for bigger and faster data. When most people think of AI, they tend to look at what it’s accomplished so far: from beating a professional Go player at his own game to Tesla’s self-driving cars. But whether you’re using AI to build a recommendation engine for your video streaming service or create a smarter chatbot, all AI systems are dependent on two things to succeed: quality input data and large amounts of computation. 

This is especially true for training the deep neural networks responsible for much of the AI headlines that hit mainstream news. That means configuring a multi-GPU cluster as a high-throughput data analytics pipeline with a data storage solution that can keep up. 

Older storage solutions based on data lakes of siloed spinning-disk servers are struggling to keep up with the demand for bigger and faster data. Modern all-flash arrays have the massively parallel architectures and low-latency data transfer speeds needed to support AI applications.

Why Host Your AI Applications on Pure Storage FlashBlade?

Pure Storage® created FlashBlade® to serve the increasing demand for big and fast data. As 100% all-NVMe scale-out network-attached storage (NAS), FlashBlade delivers native NVMe storage performance that can scale with your data needs. Advantages of powering AI apps with FlashBlade include:

• Massively parallel and scalable file and object storage
• A simplified and unified data hub for data consolidation and sharing
• Low-latency reliable performance of NVMe storage
• A time-to-insight, scale-out storage system that delivers a Modern Data Experience™

Pure Storage has also partnered with industry leaders to deliver all-in-one, plug-and-play AI infrastructure solutions: 

• FlashStack™: A converged infrastructure (CI) platform for AI apps developed in partnership with Cisco
• AIRI®: A fully integrated hardware and software solution that supports NVIDIA GPU Cloud deep-learning stack for simplified AI data pipelines