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Spot Bitcoin ETF volumes soared to $111 billion in March, highlighting investors’ consistent interest in BTC.

The crypto seized was connected to James Zhong, who was convicted in 2022 of wire fraud related to the Silk Road marketplace.

In 2017 the initial coin offering boom launched a tidal wave of activity for the crypto industry. Despite being plagued by scams and fraud, the ICO boom was also responsible for some of the most important crypto projects in the industry today.

Is 13c enough of a daily reward to mine virtual Bitcoin? 2M players think so. And why is Ava Labs telling people Web3 gaming sucks? Web3 Gamer

The new SAP HANA Cloud vector engine enables businesses to combine the power of large language models (LLMs) with company-specific, real-time data and business process know-how, all integrated in one multi-model database: SAP HANA Cloud. With the latest quarterly release, the vector engine is now generally available.

SAP HANA Cloud is a market-leading database-as-a-service enabling intelligent data applications and is one of the most adopted services within SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) internally at SAP. As of today, more than 180 different applications and services use SAP HANA Cloud with its multi-model capabilities.

Now, SAP HANA Cloud is also a leader in the generative AI age.

At SAP, we work with various LLMs such as GPT-4, Llama2, Falcon-40b, and Claude2. While these models offer amazing opportunities, they also have limitations. For example, LLMs may rely on outdated training data and lack company-specific data and business process context.

As an example, imagine having an LLM as a colleague. This colleague would be very intelligent, able to program, pass exams, or have arguments – but this colleague would not know anything about what happened in the world in the past year, nor have any idea about internal processes of your company or any of your systems. Even worse, after every conversation you have, this colleague would forget what you just talked about. Working with such a lack of memory would be of limited value. This shortcoming is why an LLM cannot answer easy questions like “What do you think about the offer from our most important supplier last week?” An LLM can only work with the initial training data – all other data must be provided as context.

Supplementing this lack of information is where SAP HANA Cloud vector engine can assist. The engine can provide LLMs with all the relevant data of an organization through a process called “retrieval-augmented generation.”

Build and deploy intelligent data applications at scale with SAP HANA Cloud Learn more A Game-Changing Feature

So how does the vector engine work? It is a new addition to SAP HANA Cloud’s multi-model engines, enabling customers to utilize the similarity between two or more vectors to solve business problems. With the integration of AI-focused technology, SAP HANA Cloud can now empower businesses to combine intuition along with data-driven insights to solve even the most complex of problems.

Some key benefits and features of the vector engine include:

• Multi-model: Users can unify all types of data into a single database to build innovative applications using an efficient data architecture and in-memory performance. By adding vector storage and processing to the same database already storing relational, graph, spatial, and even JSON data, application developers can create next-generation solutions that interact more naturally with the user.
• Enhanced search and analysis: Businesses can now apply semantic and similarity search to business processes using documents like contracts, design specifications, and even service call notes.
• Personalized recommendations: Users can benefit from an improved overall experience with more accurate and personalized suggestions.
• Optimized large language models: The output of LLMs is augmented with more effective and contextual data.

The Database Foundation of SAP’s Generative AI Strategy

The addition of the vector engine establishes SAP HANA Cloud as the default database in SAP’s generative AI solution strategy. Customers can create the next level of user experiences along with other services within SAP BTP. As an example, SAP BTP can provide centralized access to SaaS-based LLMs from multiple vendors as well as host LLMs from open-source models or third parties. The generative AI hub in SAP AI Core, a capability that facilitates the use of generative AI capabilities, will soon rely on SAP HANA Cloud as the primary vector storage. One function of the generative AI hub feature is to help provide a process for creating embeddings and storing the resulting vectors in SAP HANA Cloud. Customers building intelligent data applications can use both services together to augment LLM queries with relevant context for meaningful answers.

SAP is working on foundation models that are specific for SAP-related industry and process knowledge.

The Database for Innovation

SAP HANA Cloud continues to lead the market by storing and processing different types of relevant business data – all within the same database. The new vector engine, combined with other multi-model capabilities, opens a world of possibilities for applications to help enhance the execution of business processes. Whether improving search capabilities, gaining deeper insights for informed decisions, or optimizing LLMs, SAP HANA Cloud enables the type of applications that can elevate the expertise and effectiveness of every user.

To learn more, sign up for an introductory webinar on April 4. Do you already have a use case for SAP HANA Cloud vector engine in mind? If so, consider registering for the SAP Early Adopter Care program.

Juergen Mueller is CTO and member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, Technology & Innovation.
Stefan Baeuerle is head of Database, SAP HANA Database, & Analytics for Technology & Innovation at SAP.

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OpenAI will no longer require ChatGPT-3.5 users to create accounts to gain access to the tool.

BTC price action may be upsetting for leveraged longs, but Bitcoin market observers are finding reasons for optimism.

When an organization starts its digital transformation journey, it does so expecting great outcomes. Whether that means increasing competitiveness, efficiency, innovation, growth, employee satisfaction, reducing costs, or all of the above — expectations are always high.

Expectations can also be very diverse. End users want their jobs to be made easier and more productive. The typical CIO wants scalability, greater data protections, and a secure IT infrastructure that runs with lower total cost of ownership.

And we — the cloud software provider — also have a clear-cut expectation that customers should actually use the software. Otherwise, bold transformation objectives won’t be met and subscription contracts won’t be renewed.

Disappointment is often described as the gap between expectations and reality. When software adoption is low and expectations for digital transformation outcomes are high, disappointment is almost guaranteed.

That is why we are making the changes necessary at SAP to increase customer adoption. Adoption is our main lever for increasing customer satisfaction by ensuring we deliver on the promise of large-scale transformation.

A New Ambition for Service Delivery

My goal leading our new Customer Services & Delivery Board area is to make it easier and faster for customers to adopt our solutions. We want to ensure that customers get all the benefits they are expecting out of their large-scale cloud transformation by reducing the hurdles and ensuring long-term value.

We are fully committed to ensuring that new digital opportunities are not only introduced, but also used to their full potential. Our focus is not on “lift-and-shift” to the cloud, but on holistically and actively supporting our customers in their transformation. And we act as customer advocates, trusted partners, and guardians of their interests.

My new Board area will therefore bundle services, including professional services, premium engagements, customer innovations, and customer support. In addition, it will include cloud infrastructure, cloud operations, cloud lifecycle management, and private cloud provision for SAP customers worldwide.

Why Now?

Adoption has always been at the core of our efforts. What’s different now is that a truly transformative technology — artificial intelligence — has emerged and is enabling end users to interact in more natural human ways. This has powerful technological and societal implications.

Be ready for AI built for business with SAP Learn how

It is also presenting software providers like us with unique opportunities to enhance adoption. Think how easy (and fun) AI interactions have become. AI innovation is a catalyst for us to enhance adoption, and we are seizing the moment with determined steps toward providing SAP Business AI.

But for our valued customers to benefit from all the advantages of SAP Business AI, we really need to be there for them throughout their cloud transformation journey, because AI innovation only happens in the cloud.

What’s Changing?

We know that cloud customers want flexible and innovative solutions that help them solve their biggest challenges and that can be deployed quickly and consumed easily. For the past 52 years, we have been vested in the success of our customers with the best team of experts in the industry to support them at every point of the customer value journey. That has not changed!

What has changed, however, is that we are putting the power of my new Board area behind the delivery of our solutions, providing governance and support to our delivery ecosystem, and continuously improving our cloud delivery and support methodologies. And we have created a unique opportunity to bring together cloud operations to streamline the entire customer experience.

Our overarching objective is customer satisfaction. We are committed to increasing it through comprehensive and innovative post-sales technical delivery services or partner-led implementations to drive our customers’ business transformation and deliver measurable value, which is “business speak” for absolutely delighting them! That’s how we will ensure organizations can fully realize their new digital opportunities.

Offering Transformation as a Service

We deliver the most complete business transformation suite in the industry. That has been our ambition since launching RISE with SAP some years ago. With the range of capabilities on offer today — including RISE with SAP, GROW with SAP, SAP Signavio, cloud application lifecycle management, SAP LeanIX, and, of course, SAP Business Technology Platform — we are well on our way to enabling customers to accelerate transformation.

We are committed to optimizing our portfolio for delivery, and we are working on tooling and automation to speed up the process. That’s how we are reaffirming our promise to provide transformation as a service. 

Closing the Gap Between Expectations and Outcomes

Adoption of our portfolio opens new possibilities for business model innovation along with increased competitiveness, cost savings, and employee satisfaction, while realizing the benefits of new SAP innovations more quickly: essentially all the outcomes organizations are expecting when they set out on the pathway to digital transformation.

So, you could say, we’re more dedicated than ever to closing the gap between expectations for cloud transformation and the corresponding outcomes.

Thomas Saueressig is a member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, leading Customer Services & Delivery.

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