Oracle Q3 Earnings: 5 Things To Know

Oracle’s AI ‘More Important’?

Although content-generating tools such as ChatGPT and Dall-E have captured much of the artificial intelligence hype wave this year, Oracle executives assert that their AI developments are arguably “more important.”

Text-generating ChatGPT and image-generating Dall-E—both created by OpenAI, which has a multibillion-dollar investment from Oracle rival Microsoft—don’t have the same weight as Oracle’s AI systems for cancer, wellness, heart disease and other complex health care subjects, Ellison said on Thursday’s quarterly earnings call.

“People talk about ChatGPT being really cool because it can write my high-school essay for me,” Ellison said. “Well, how about reducing hospital readmissions at MD Anderson by 30 percent? You decide which is more important. … And GPT is very cool. There are other applications other than generative language in these large language models.”

His comments bring to mind those of IBM CEO Arvind Krishna when discussing his company’s role in AI. While Microsoft and Google compete for consumer attention, IBM is innovating in the areas of automation and business use – “real enterprise AI,” as Oracle CEO Safra Catz called it on Oracle’s call.

“If you can automate the drive-thru and order taking for quick-serve restaurants, that’s an example of what can happen,” Krishna said on the latest IBM earnings call. “If we can get deflection rates of 40, 50, 60 percent at everyone’s call centers, that’s a massive operational efficiency for all of our clients. If we can help retirees get their pension through interacting with a Watson-powered AI chatbot, that is an enterprise use case where all of these technologies come into play. By the way, all my three examples are real clients, where we are resulting in anywhere from hundreds to thousands of people, the efficiency, for each of these clients.”