AI Star Cloudsufi’s CEO On Why GenAI Is ‘The New Electricity’

Can I learn what my dog is telling me? We are actually working on that engine right now,’ Cloudsufi CEO Irfan Khan, tells CRN.

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Cloudsufi CEO Irfan Khan

Generative AI will eventually change the world similar to the invention of electricity.

That’s according to Cloudsufi CEO Irfan Khan, who says that the countless applications for GenAI in the coming years will drive monumental business outcomes.

“AI is the new electricity,” said Khan, who’s been in the industry for over 20 years and is the former CEO of AI company Bristlecone. “The reason is, if we think about when electricity was formulated, it’s a general purpose technology, which means it can be used for not one thing, but for a lot of different applications. That’s exactly what GenAI is.”

Cloudsufi’s AI customer pipeline has increased a whopping 12x in 2023 with about half of those clients coming from use cases “which we never thought customers would explore,” including around training AI models, natural language, AI video as well as game-changing productivity solutions.

Looking ahead on how GenAI will reshape the world similar to electricity, Khan said Cloudsufi—for example—is building AI engines working on understanding what animals are saying.

“Can I learn what my dog is telling me? We are actually working on that engine right now,” said Khan. “Can we learn how whales talk to each other? When a kid cannot speak, when a child is two years old—can that two-year-old talk to us? That’s the impact. It will happen. It’s just a matter of time. It’s just about training engines now, right? You tag it and you train it.”

“Think about how fun it would be that you can actually have a conversation with your dog. You still do it. Most of the time they know what we’re saying, but we don’t know what they are saying. Now that’s the power of GenAI, which probably is 36 months away,” he said.

How Google, Cloudsufi And GenAI Will Help Shape The World

Cloudsufi is a San Jose, Calif.-based AI and data supply chain specialist that’s one of Google Cloud’s top AI partners in America. The company works with a number of high-profile clients—from large cancer research hospitals to Fortune 100 companies—in developing cutting edge AI applications around data monetization alongside Google.

This year, Cloudsufi launched its own Generative AI Innovation Lab powered by Google Cloud with a capacity of over 500 qualified AI professionals. The company’s goal is to close the gap between human intuition and data-driven decisions by empowering next-generation autonomous enterprises.

Cloudsufi’s AI models are based on technologies such as Generative Adversarial Networks, Variational Autoencoders, Google PaLM, LaMDa, and Transformer, capable of generating realistic data and app building by simulating complex scenarios including structured and unstructured data like code, text, image, dialog, audio, and video.

“The whole idea of the GenAI Lab is just to disrupt, to disrupt, to disrupt, but also setting a bright expectation to customers that they’re in a good space, in a good ecosystem, and have good tech,” said Khan. “Google probably has the best tech. The gears are amazing. It’s just beautiful to see what we can accomplish.”

Google Unleashes Gemini

Google has launched a slew of new generative AI products and innovation in 2023 that Cloudsufi is leveraging including Google’s large language model PaLM and Google Workspace which was injected with GenAI capabilities this year.

Just this week, Google unleashed a new AI large language model, Gemini, that looks to eventually power many of Google’s most popular products and services.

“Gemini [is] our most capable and general model yet, with state-of-the-art performance across many leading benchmarks,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai in a blog post on Wednesday. “It was built from the ground up to be multimodal, which means it can generalize and seamlessly understand, operate across and combine different types of information including text, code, audio, image and video.”

Google’s new Gemini LLM will power its generative AI chatbot, Bard, to help with advanced understanding, reasoning, planning and other abilities. In 2024, Google said Gemini will become available in more of its products and services including Search, Chrome and Duet AI.

“This new era of models represents one of the biggest science and engineering efforts we’ve undertaken as a company,” said Pichai. “I’m genuinely excited for what’s ahead, and for the opportunities Gemini will unlock for people everywhere.”

GenAI Is The Modern Day ‘Gold Rush’

For Cloudsufi’s part, the company plans to push the boundaries of what data and GenAI can do for the world in 2024 and beyond.

“We are doing some beautiful stuff on Google tech and they’re going mature. For us, maturity is not building an engine. We can build that right now. In fact, we’re building it for one of the largest companies in the world right now,” Khan said. “But the actual maturity will happen when we are able to measure the impact of this capability on our lives.”

The world might not be seeing the massive impacts generative AI will have because most companies currently still need to monetize their data and have the correct data foundation in place for GenAI to make game-changing impacts.

However, the future is bright for Cloudsufi as the AI and data company has been investing in artificial intelligence for years and is an early adopter of GenAI.

“Everybody wants to make sure that they can leverage this next generation of technology which is coming in right now,” said Khan. “I call it the gold rush. I live in the same area and in the valley [as the 1800s California Gold Rush]. This is a gold rush, except the actual value of gold will be created three years from now. That’s our goal.”