At the Red Hat Summit 2024 event today, Red Hat is announcing a series of new products and partnerships aimed at infusing artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities across its open hybrid cloud portfolio.
Like nearly every other major IT vendor in 2024, Red Hat is racing to integrate and expand AI on its platform and services. Red Hat itself is not an AI vendor in that it doesn't build its own large language models (LLMs), nor does it have any real aspirations to be one. Rather the new tools and services the company is rolling out are all about enabling organizations and developers to build, deploy, manage and scale AI applications.
The launches signal Red Hat's vision of delivering AI workloads, model training and tuning across on-premises, datacenters, public clouds and edge environments.
The key announcements including the following:
- Red Hat Lightspeed: Infusing generative AI capabilities across Red Hat's hybrid cloud portfolio
- Red Hat OpenShift AI: Expanding predictive and generative AI flexibility across hybrid clouds
- Podman AI Lab.: Developer tooling introduced by Red Hat to help developers get started with AI
In a virtual press briefing ahead of the Red Hat Summit 2024, executives outlined how the company is infusing generative AI capabilities across its open hybrid cloud portfolio.
“The momentum around AI is not slowing down at this point,” Steven Huels, VP and GM of the AI business unit at Red Hat, said. “The pace of innovation is probably only increasing.”
OpenShift AI looks to accelerate deploymentsAt the heart of Red Hat's AI strategy is OpenShift AI, delivering a platform to develop, deploy and manage generative AI and predictive models in hybrid cloud environments.
OpenShift is Red Hat's Kubernetes cloud-native platform for application deployment. With OpenShift AI, rather than just generic workloads, the focus is on providing specific capabilities for AI model deployments.
OpenShift AI is gaining enhanced capabilities for optimized model serving, edge deployments, hardware acceleration profiles and distributed workload management across hybrid infrastructure.
“The beauty about OpenShift AI is it brings that world where you have the application developers who already know and love OpenShift working very closely in that DevOps type of world,” Sherard Griffin, senior director of global software engineering at Red Hat, said. “It brings them together with the data science, AI engineers and the ML ops engineers that are working to operationalize AI, all in the same platform.”
Developers need AI help,tooFor developers new to AI, Red Hat is adding new AI capabilities to its Podman Desktop application.
The Podman AI Lab is a new feature for the Podman Desktop that will enable developers to build and customize AI models on a local desktop system. Podman AI Labs runs locally and provides templates, models and code snippets to kickstart AI development across platforms.
“What this does is it gives us a recipe catalog that has a number of some of the most common AI use cases,” Ben Breard, senior principal product manager at Red Hat, explained. “These can serve as either the templates for new applications or just simply teach developers how to interact, work with and infuse that type of AI intelligence into their own applications.”
Moving ahead with AI at 'Lightspeed'Red Hat is also growing its Lightspeed branding for AI beyond just its Ansible automation platform.
In 2023, Red Hat announced Ansible Lightspeed as a generative AI-powered service to help organizations more easily query and build automation playbooks. Red Hat is now committing to extending the basic genAI ideas behind Ansible Lightspeed across its product portfolio.
The first placement for Red Hat Lightspeed will be with OpenShift, providing a genAI assistant, so that users can use simple language to get answers to questions related to OpenShift deployment and management.
Red Hat also revealed plans for RHEL Lightspeed, bringing AI assistance to its flagship Linux operating system.
“Our goal is to really increase productivity and efficiency and help customers adopt,” Chuck Dubuque, senior director of product marketing at Red Hat, said. “We want to offer easy ways not just to adopt our technology, but also to make it more efficient to use.”