HPE Discover 2023: Live updates from CEO Antonio Neri's keynote

Here's a shot of the front of the conference centre, which is starting to fill up as CEO Antonio Neri's keynote is about to get underway.

We are now making our way through the exhibition centre and into the conference hall for the keynote.

The conference hall is now filling up. Not long now until CEO Antonio Neri will be out to tell us all about HPE's latest advancements.

First up is HPE senior vice president and managing director Alfredo Yepez, who is welcoming everyone to Barcelona. 

Yepez now brings on stage CEO Antonio Neri. 

Neri begins by setting out the agenda for today, and it looks like AI is going to be the primary focus of today's  keynote.

Neri outlines HPE's "data first strategy that is AI-native and hybrid by design".

Neri says HPE see the breakout of generative AI as transformative, requiring way more processing power and thus requires a tailored IT infrastructure.

Neri is discussing the demand for the IT infrastructure that can enable generative AI deployments. 

This will be delivered by HPE Greenlake for large language models.

Neri has brought on stage MD of Taiga Cloud Karl Harvard to talk about the how generative AI can help businesses bring their ideas to life, and enhance their products and services.

Harvard is talking about the importance he sees in 'democratizing AI', giving businesses of all sizes access to generative AI models, without locking them in to a cloud service provider.

Neri and Harvard are now discussing how they are providing an alternative to hyperscalers with their hybrid cloud, generative AI solution.

Harvard leaves the stage and Neri moves on to the AI Lifecycle and how businesses will be able to leverage existing models to improve their business operations with HPE GreenLake.

HPE's collaboration with NVIDIA is expected to be a key part of the major announcements here in Barcelona, and Neri is now introducing NVIDIA vice president of enterprise computing Manuvir Das.

Here is Manuvir Das, discussing how NVIDIA and HPE's collaboration changed from providing individual AI solutions to businesses, to a model where both companies are experiencing huge demand to help organizations build their own large language models, providing the software, hardware, and knowledge to do so.

Neri is now leading into announcing a new generative AI turnkey solution that will enable businesses to fine-tune and deploy their own models. 

The enterprise genAI solution stack will help organizations build from a foundation model of their choice, develop a custom enterprise model, and run this model and scale it wherever they need to.

Das is explaining how hard it is to build models, and how foundation models have fundamentally changed this environment.

Das says with the solution produced by NVIDIA's collaboration with HPE, companies can fine-tune these models on their data and deploy this custom model wherever they need it.

Neri has another announcement, a digital twin solution which will combine NVIDIA's Omniverse Enterprise hybrid compute platform and HPE's storage solutions.

Das explains how NVIDIA's Omniverse allows a vast range of modelling, simulation services which HPE's hardware solutions underpin. 

That's it for Manuvir Das as he steps off the stage.

Neri is now moving onto several new HPE GreenLake solutions.

Today HPE are announcing significant performance enhancements for HPE GreenLake File Storage for AI, which can increase capacity, density, and throughput by 7x. 

HPE are also announcing new services for AI to support businesses looking to implement generative AI in their business.

This will include financial services where expert consultants can help optimize an organization's IT resource allocation.

Next up, Neri is now welcoming Joana Rafael COO at Sensei, Andreas Krannbitl CIO at SPAR ICS, and Dr. Ahmed Ali Alsohaily group head of technology at Red Sea Global, to discuss the data challenges of becoming 'AI native'.

Here they are discussing where AI cloud features in their business operations. For example, Spar established a team to explore AI applications five years ago with a goal to improve the value chain for fruit and vegetables.

Both representatives from Spar and Red Sea Global are relaying how digitizing and automating their respective experiences  creates vasts amounts of data and requires a robust hybrid cloud solution to run seamlessly.

That does it for the stories from industry on how different organizations are utilising these transformative technologies.

Neri is back to AI and how much has changed in the previous year.

Neri explains the technical part of innovating around genAI solutions is actually the easiest part of the puzzle.

"The most difficult problem is how we think about data responsibility".

"Solving societal problems is core to what we do", Neri is now introducing CEO of  Good Tech Advisory, Kay Firth-Butterfield.

Firth-Butterfield, a former British barrister, explains her background in artificial intelligence and studying its link with human beings back in the early 2000s.

Firth-Butterfield is commenting on the state of human-AI relations.

For companies looking to move forward with AI responsibility and with compliance, Firth-Butterfield thinks Biden's executive order as a helpful guideline.

Whereas Europe's AI act is stumbling somewhat over how it should regulate LLMs

Companies should be educating the board, C-suites, and the rest of its employees, as well as implementing an ethics advisory board. 

Neri adds that HPE has done all of these things, and one of the top highlights from their most recent meeting was the risk from AI. 

"We hold ourselves accountable to tackle these problems head on – what advice would you have on how to approach this issue."

Firth-Butterfield responds key to this is good self-regulation, ensuring the C-suite is giving permission to people through the company to understand their responsibility is a top factor.

"A lot of tech companies tend to reward people for moving fast, but it is important you reward people for moving fast but also responsibly."

Firth-Butterfield notes every company is an AI company now, and executives cannot move forward without keeping these issues front of mind.

Neri now asks what the implications of AI will be on business and society.

Firth-Butterfield says one under-appreciated factor is the data, "although there are 100 million users of ChatGPT...in fact, there are 3 billion people are not connected to the internet".

While internet data is really useful when serving US or Europe, it is less so in other regions, according to Firth-Butterfield. 

Firth-Butterfield also stresses users of ChatGPT are predominantly male, and so the data that comes from that is not totally representative.

Neri now asks why Firth-Butterfield is optimistic.

Her response is that when looking through the lens of sustainability although AI is overrepresented in terms of its emissions, AI also has a role to play in sustainable improvements.

For example, detecting water leaks, increasing individual household energy efficiency, and using AI to calculate and boost awareness of where emissions are coming from.

Importantly Firth-Butterfield stresses being careful about what one uses AI for will be essential to establishing a less carbon-intensive ecosystem of AI technologies.

That concludes Firth-Butterfield's time on stage and Neri is now on to his concluding remarks, thanking the numerous sponsors and attendees.

Neri is finishing up with stating HPE is at the forefront of the AI transformation that is currently sweeping up the world. 

"Let's share the future together" 

And that wraps up today's keynote, people are filing out of the conference hall.