Eye on OCI

Larry Ellison's OCW2023 Keynote - from an APEX Point of View

Written by Simon Greenwood | Sep 20, 2023 2:01:25 PM

DSP's Head of Development Services Simon Greenwood provides his thoughts on Larry Ellison’s Oracle CloudWorld 2023 Keynote, from an APEX perspective…

Larry Ellison devoted his keynote to AI and I can sum it up in one phrase: “APEX is front and centre”.

But, I should elaborate!

What is Generative AI?

Generative AI at Oracle CloudWorld 2023 is a hot topic with several enhancements to products, especially APEX. But what actually is Generative AI?
Generative artificial intelligence is a subset of artificial intelligence. It is focused on creating and generating data and content but also experiences. Generative AI creates limitless opportunities from an application development perspective.

One area to benefit is task automation and code creation. To quote directly from the keynote:
  • Improved APEX Application Generator: No Code - Not - Low Code
  • Improved Autonomous Elastic Database: No Human Labour – No Human Error
  • New Object Relational Database: Generate Relational Schema from JSON Documents
  • New Oracle Vector Database: Specialises Generative LLMs for Medicine, Law…
  • New Cloud Date Intelligence Platform: Population Scale Data Trains Medical AI Models

So can low-code become no-code?

The answer is yes for certain tasks, but don’t worry developers you are still needed more than ever. The obvious win is productivity gains in relation to tasks such as writing SQL and having the reassurance that what is generated is more secure and optimised than it would have been if manually written or constructed using traditional query-building tools.

Reference was made to the APEX Cloud Application Generator; this seems to focus on code generation enhancements, which adds significant productivity gains to SQL code creation for citizen (low-code) developers using natural language processing. It will also improve productivity for professional developers, but for now, citizen developers will gain the most from this feature.

It is worth mentioning that OCI provides the only low-code service (APEX) on an autonomous infrastructure.

Besides Generative AI, OCI also provides access to a portfolio of AI services such as AI speech, Data Science, and document understanding.

Common uses for AI within your application are conversational chatbots, image and object detection, natural language processing, speech translation, code generation, predictive analytics and text generation for workflow and messages such as SMS, email, and marketing.

The potential for AI is huge – as Larry said, what other technology has so quickly got the attention of heads of state! Of course, there are risks – there always is. But as with all new technology, there is the potential to make our lives more comfortable and more prosperous. I came away from the keynote excited for what the future of AI holds and for the part APEX clearly has to play in it.

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