- “Every government, almost every government, is going to want a sovereign cloud,” Larry Ellison, Oracle's chairman and chief technology officer, said during a recent earnings call with Wall Street analysts. .
- Oracle's cloud technology is part of Albania's efforts to cut red tape. Albania is using ChatGPT to speed up the review of legal issues related to joining the European Union, and multiple countries are working with Elon Musk's Starlink internet service to improve rural access. .
- Governments are increasingly digitizing processes, and while cloud services and artificial intelligence will be a big part of the future, critical government functions such as defense, taxes, and health care cannot be completely entrusted to automated technologies. No, experts say.
Every technology company is talking about the AI opportunity. Oracle is no exception. However, during an earnings call in March, Oracle's Larry Ellison laid out future market opportunities focused on key customers that may receive less attention from investors than Fortune 500 companies.
The founder, former CEO, and current chairman and chief technology officer of Oracle, said he sees much more national and state government applications running on platforms like Oracle Cloud Infrastructure than they do today. He suggested that this is beginning to be realized in a variety of ways.
“We're talking about winning business with corporations. For the first time, we're starting to win business with countries,” Ellison said. “There are a number of countries that are negotiating with the central government over sovereign territory.”
Big tech companies competing for large government contracts in the cloud is nothing new. Microsoft and Amazon have been engaged in a long-running battle over cloud contracts with the Pentagon, with the AI players, along with Oracle and Google, ending up fully participating in a $9 billion Pentagon contract in 2022.
But when Ellison spoke to analysts on a recent earnings call, he took his prediction a step further: “Every government, almost every government, is going to want a sovereign cloud and its government-only regions.” said.
Working with Nvidia and Microsoft on generative AI capabilities, Oracle is already helping countries reduce red tape using cloud technology. One example Ellison cited was Albania. With the help of chatGPT he is trying to get promoted to EU. Generative AI can help decipher and summarize the law and what the country needs to change to comply with EU regulations.
“It took eight years to harmonize the laws so that Serbia could join the EU,” Ellison said. “Albania is facing the same thing, but with generative AI, he could probably read the entire corpus of Albanian laws in 18 months to about two years and actually translate Albanian laws into EU can be harmonized.”
Some analysts are skeptical that Mr. Ellison's speech will amount to little more than a typical meeting of executives from major business units. Oracle shares are up about 21% since the beginning of the year, but Barclays analyst Raimo Renshaw expressed concern that OCI's growth will slow in the latest results, saying, “This is the main investment story, so investors may cause concern.
Future versions with solutions powered by cloud services and artificial intelligence can make government even more efficient. First and foremost, Ellison said, the government values redundancy during disasters and disaster recovery. But it is also expanding into medical information and internet access projects.
Countries including Serbia are standardizing on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and using generative AI for processes such as healthcare automation. Deals are being struck in Kenya and Rwanda to provide internet services to remote areas in partnership with Elon Musk's Starlink, with OCI and Starlink mapping rural farms to determine which crops go where. We are checking to see if they are grown locally and if they are getting enough nutrients. nitrogen and water.
“These maps are AI-backed and will help with agricultural production planning and agricultural production forecasting, market forecasting, and agricultural production logistics, all in the form of next-generation national applications.” Ellison said.
Food security, internet access in rural schools and rural hospitals, and more are what Ellison calls “all sorts of interesting new AI applications that you've probably never heard of before, at least that I've ever heard of.” “This is one of those cases where it never happened.” We've been working on him for the last 12 months and are now halfway through delivery. ”
He also referred to the “total” automation of vaccination programs and other health programs.
“We live in a world where data and information is the future of money,” said Dan Gardner, CEO of digital strategy firm Code & Theory. “If the government can access and act on that data faster, why delay it? We want to make it as efficient as possible, and a lot of it is like mundane human resources. And then maybe those people do something else that's more valuable.”
Cloud and generative AI applications can enable countries to provide internet access to rural areas, increasing educational opportunities and creating more economic value. Tapan Parikh, an associate professor at Cornell University, said this could also give the public greater insight into government processes. “What technology has always been good at is the potential to make bureaucracies more efficient, or at least more internally transparent,” he said.
“Black Mirror” government
But the move to move more government processes to the cloud is also opening the door to new risks, especially as countries rely on newly developed generative AI systems. The process may be faster than ever before, but as technology advances, mistakes are inevitable, potentially giving cybercriminals access to citizens' data.
“These technologies should not be used as an excuse for not maintaining oversight and control over the political process,” Parikh said. “Certainly, I think this is very important, especially when dealing with countries that may not have similar governance capabilities.”
Oracle did not respond to requests for additional comment on Ellison's earnings call.
“There are also some negative aspects of 'Black Mirror,' like Big Brother, data wars, AI wars,” Garder said. “This is incredible in terms of removing red tape and making more efficient use of crops across the country. That’s the thing.”
AI raises many concerns.
Gardner pointed to the proliferation of more generative content in election years around the world and all the issues associated with technology-enabled interference. “Maybe it's not like a chip on the ground. But it's about data security, who you are, who the government is, authentication of the content you're viewing, financial systems and AI governance. It's all the connection points between. Using AI as a tool, disruption is very scary.”
Simone Bohnenberger, the cloud company's chief product officer, said, “The world's large governments want to completely move all their services, especially critical services like defense, taxes, and health care, to the cloud and put them in the hands of artificial intelligence.'' We can't afford to move it.” phrase. “That's not the category, and I don't think there's a responsibility to do it. The potential risks outweigh the benefits of doing it.”
The OpenAI that created ChatGPT was trained primarily on existing content on the internet. This can cause problems, Bohnenberger said, especially when text in a lesser-known language like Albanian needs to be analyzed.
“If you look at the World Wide Web or the Internet, I think the majority of the content out there is in English, a quarter of the content is in English, followed by Chinese,” she said. “Albanian is a minority. It's kind of an outlier language, in a small country like Albania, and to me it's very questionable how well it actually works. There's not much data on which to train a model.” And if you don't have a lot of data, then the output will be very messy.”
Additionally, there are security and data risks in allowing foreign companies to access national data, Parikh said. Even the United States, with all its resources, is vulnerable to data hacks, including the recent breach of contractor CGI Federal and employees' personally identifying information in February. The recent battle between the US and China over TikTok is an example of how control over sensitive consumer data can interfere with geopolitics. “Certainly I think that will be a concern going forward for countries that are working with vendors from different countries,” Parikh said.
