Snowflake (SNOW) – Innovation? – April 27, 2024
A key concern surrounding Snowflake for the last few quarters has been pace of innovation. Leadership will explicitly tell you that they need to move faster, which is why Sridhar Ramaswamy was brought in as the new CEO. This week, Snowflake launched a new LLM that serves as positive evidence for the pace of innovation picking up steam. Snowflake “Arctic” is the name of the new product that is specifically built for enterprise data. It was created with efficiency in mind and trained in the most cost conscious way possible. It’s also open source, which means customers can easily use it to create models more affordably. It also means 3rd party developers will invariably improve Arctic over time through their own work. That will make this an even lower cost model. It’s the same idea as for Meta’s Llama series.
Arctic is great for standard query language (SQL) generation like you’d expect from a data lake and warehouse player. It also ranks very highly in code following… even compared to larger parameter models. Bulls should be pleased with this small, yet important debut.
