American communications giant Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) is putting together a billion dollar investment fund and program to help enterprise customers run their own artificial intelligence operations.
The company launched the fund at its Cisco Live event in Las Vegas on Sunday. Cisco said it had already raised close to $200 million of the $1 billion investment fund, and had made some investments in AI companies including Cohere, Mistral AI, and Scale AI.
Cohere delivers security-focused frontier large language models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) capabilities to enterprise customers. Meanwhile, Mistral AI focuses on generative AI, while Scale AI trains and validates AI applications.
Additionally, Cisco recently led Scale AI’s Series F funding as the largest strategic investor. This move is part of Cisco’s concerted effort to tap into the lucrative AI industry, which has seen significant growth over the last 18 months. According to recent research from tech analyst IDC, the global AI market is expected to double to over $500 billion in the next three years.
“AI is fundamentally changing every industry around the globe; it’s changing the way users and businesses communicate with each other, it’s changing the way they leverage technology and Cisco, we believe, has a very significant role to play being the trusted partner to help our customers navigate this new era,” said Mark Patterson, the company’s chief strategy officer.
The networking giant also aims to use generative AI to enhance its products and services. Additionally, the firm believes that investing in these companies and forging closer ties is a good way to keep up with the latest developments.
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Cisco has made multiple investments into AI over the past few years
Over the past several years, Cisco has made over 20 AI-focused acquisitions and investments to advance generative AI and machine learning capabilities and integrate AI across its portfolio. Besides these investments, Cisco plans to collaborate with AI companies on product innovations, allowing for co-innovation.
Patterson emphasized that Cisco’s core mission is to connect and protect the AI era. Cisco additionally provides the necessary infrastructure to support AI, from large-scale operations to enterprise customers deploying AI in their own data centers.
Cisco unveiled its Nexus HyperFabric AI clusters at the event. It’s designed to help enterprise customers build infrastructure for running generative AI models and inference applications without needing deep IT knowledge and skills.
These AI clusters combine Cisco’s AI-native networking with Nvidia’s accelerated computing and AI software, along with a robust Vast data store. According to the company, these clusters will enable customers to focus on AI innovation rather than managing IT infrastructure.
Cisco’s own research indicates that in the next two years, 60 percent of IT leaders and professionals expect to deploy AI-enabled predictive network automation. Additionally, 75 percent plan to implement tools that provide end-to-end visibility through a single console across various network domains, including campus and branch, WAN, data center, internet, public clouds, and industrial networks.
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Artificial general intelligence is waiting
The next step is artificial general intelligence (AGI).
AGI refers to the development of machines with the ability to understand, learn, and apply intelligence across a wide range of tasks at a level comparable to human intelligence. It also aims for a comprehensive cognitive ability that can adapt to various complex scenarios.
Cisco isn’t one of the companies chasing AGI, however. That’s being relegated to companies like Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT), OpenAI, or Elon Musk’s xAI, and also smaller companies like Verses AI (CBOE: VERS) (OTCQB: VRSSF).
Verses AI aims to create systems capable of understanding and learning from the world in a human-like manner, striving towards the development of a universal intelligence that can perform a wide array of tasks across different domains.
Furthermore, its approach combines cognitive computing, machine learning, and advanced neural networks to build AI models that can adapt and evolve over time. Verses AI offers innovative solutions that push the boundaries of current AI capabilities, with a strong emphasis on research and development in AGI to achieve more autonomous and intelligent systems.
Verses AI is a sponsor of Mugglehead news coverage
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