Undigestible Rate Of Change Sees Vendor Supergroup Create The Open Compute Of AI

A group of top enterprise vendors feel that AI is changing so fast it’s “undigestible” to many, so they’ve created an org they hope will function like the Open Compute Project so you don’t make a meal of it.

The “undigestible rate of change” quote was offered to The Register by VAST Data co-founder Jeff Denworth, who told us: “The pace of evolution of AI is nothing short of breathtaking.” Users who try to deploy AI, he said, find it “hard to keep track.”

Denworth lamented the fact that vendors each define their own approaches to AI, leaving the industry without a neutral “watercooler” at which to share experiences or resources.

VAST Data founded an org called Cosmos to become that watercooler. Denworth said one model for the org is the Open Compute Project, the outfit that designs hardware and best practices derived from member organizations’ own efforts and open sources them for anyone to share. Another model is the RSA conference that, despite bearing a vendor’s name, has become a security event that touches on any and all infosec topics.

Jonas Rosland, who has filled community manager roles at VMware, enterprise Linux outfit CIQ, and Dell EMC, has been hired to make Cosmos work. Denworth said a code of conduct has been developed and recruitment of experts to lead content tracks has commenced.

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As an example of how Cosmos might work, Denworth told The Register an org working on large language models has been approached to manage an ethical AI track.

Speaking for VAST, he said the vendor will “happily prioritize” features that track develops.

Denworth admitted Cosmos is in a chicken-and-egg moment because it’s yet to produce the content that proves its worth. But he is willing to wait. “This is not a sprint,” he said, adding that the org has sufficient resources to have begun planning for events around the world.

Plenty of the group’s current membership roster - NVIDIA, xAI, Supermicro, Deloitte, WWT, Cisco, CoreWeave, Core42, NEA, Impetus, Run:AI, and Dremio – have decently deep pockets. Nvidia boss Jensen Huang helped to launch Cosmos, which won’t hurt its credibility.

Its structure might: Open Compute was founded around Facebook’s hardware designs, which it shared to enlarge the ecosystem of possible suppliers and out of altruism. The members of Cosmos have something to sell you. And the org’s full name is “Cosmos by Vast.”

Indeed, on the same day as it revealed Cosmos VAST Data announced new collaborations with Nvidia, Cisco, and Equinix that our sibling site Blocks and Files has explained here and here. ®