Snowflake Launches Arctic

The Most Open, Enterprise-Grade Large Language Model

Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW), the Data Cloud company, today announced Snowflake Arctic, a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) uniquely designed to be the most open, enterprise-grade LLM on the market. With its unique Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, Arctic delivers top-tier intelligence with unparalleled efficiency at scale. It is optimized for complex enterprise workloads, topping several industry benchmarks across SQL code generation, instruction following, and more. In addition, Snowflake is releasing Arctic’s weights under an Apache 2.0 license and details of the research leading to how it was trained, setting a new openness standard for enterprise AI technology. The Snowflake Arctic LLM is a part of the Snowflake Arctic model family, a family of models built by Snowflake that also include the best practical text-embedding models for retrieval use cases.

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Snowflake Arctic adds truly open large language model with unmatched intelligence and efficiency to the Snowflake Arctic model family (Graphic: Business Wire)

“This is a watershed moment for Snowflake, with our AI research team innovating at the forefront of AI,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO, Snowflake. “By delivering industry-leading intelligence and efficiency in a truly open way to the AI community, we are furthering the frontiers of what open source AI can do. Our research with Arctic will significantly enhance our capability to deliver reliable, efficient AI to our customers.”

Arctic Breaks Ground With Truly Open, Widely Available Collaboration

According to a recent report by Forrester, approximately 46 percent of global enterprise AI decision-makers noted that they are leveraging existing open source LLMs to adopt generative AI as a part of their organization’s AI strategy.¹ With Snowflake as the data foundation to more than 9,400 companies and organizations around the world², it is empowering all users to leverage their data with industry-leading open LLMs, while offering them flexibility and choice with what models they work with.

Now with the launch of Arctic, Snowflake is delivering a powerful, truly open model with an Apache 2.0 license that permits ungated personal, research, and commercial use. Taking it one step further, Snowflake also provides code templates, alongside flexible inference and training options so users can quickly get started with deploying and customizing Arctic using their preferred frameworks. These will include NVIDIA NIM with NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, and Hugging Face. For immediate use, Arctic is available for serverless inference in Snowflake Cortex, Snowflake’s fully managed service that offers machine learning and AI solutions in the Data Cloud. It will also be available on Amazon Web Services (AWS), alongside other model gardens and catalogs, which will include Hugging Face, Lamini, Microsoft Azure, NVIDIA API catalog, Perplexity, Together AI, and more.