In an extension of their AI partnership, Oracle and Microsoft have signed a multiyear agreement to support the growing demand of Bing conversational searches, which was opened to the public recently.
As part of the agreement, Microsoft will use its own Azure infrastructure for AI in combination with the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Supercluster — an Nvidia GPU-supported supercomputing training and inferencing service released in March.
The OCI Supercluster service is the first tier of Oracle's generative AI strategy, targeted at companies such as Cohere or Hugging Face, which are working on developing large language models (LLMs) to support their end users.
The combination of the OCI Supercluster and Azure AI will allow Microsoft to conduct inferencing of AI models that are continuously being optimized to power Bing conversational searches every day, the companies said in a joint statement.
Inferencing is a process by which an AI system draws conclusions or makes predictions based on the information and knowledge it has.
“Leveraging the Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure, Microsoft is able to use managed services like Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to orchestrate OCI Compute at massive scale to support increasing demand for Bing conversational search,” the companies said, adding that Bing conversational search requires powerful clusters of computing infrastructure that support the evaluation and analysis of search results that are conducted by Bing’s inference model.
Inference models, according to Oracle and Microsoft, in general require thousands of compute and storage instances and tens of thousands of GPUs that can operate in parallel as a single supercomputer over a multiterabit network.
In September, Oracle extended its partnership with Microsoft by collocating its database hardware (including Oracle Exadata) and software in Microsoft Azure data centers, giving customers direct access to Oracle database services running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) via Azure.