HP's secure AI

-This article was produced in collaboration with HP-

It is a fact: artificial intelligence (AI) is popular and increasingly widely used. Many companies are now using online AI applications such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Microsoft's Copilot. But despite its numerous benefits, companies also report that they sometimes worry about security of sensitive information when applying AI. However, there is a secure solution...

 Market researcher Gartner argues that AI will take off in the next few years. Some eight in 10 large companies will have fully embraced this technology by 2026, according to Gartner. A big difference from 2022, when only 16% of Dutch companies used AI (according to the Central Bureau of Statistics). At the same time, companies are also more cautious about AI applications.

In view of data safety and laws and regulations, they are extremely careful with sensitive business or customer information. The fear is that this information will leak out through AI applications like generative AI and fall into the hands of third parties. This fear is not unjustified, as in some cases AI tools apply information that users input as data to further train and refine their AI models.

So, on the one hand, companies have concerns regarding the security of sensitive information and, on the other, they see the great benefits of AI in supporting their business. Banning the use of AI is a missed opportunity, as the technology offers great benefits in, for example, increasing productivity, automating operations but also increasing employee job satisfaction.

Banning the use of such applications could cause frustrations. Fortunately, there is a solution to that.

Safely applying AI

Indeed, an alternative to banning AI applications and models may be to run them locally. HP offers solutions that benefit not only security, but also speed and cost. To this end, it has developed a wide range of laptops and desktop systems specifically tailored to AI applications.

When running AI applications locally, you can be sure that all the data and information you share with an AI application stays within your own company and is never used as training data, for example. You are 'at the controls' yourself and so the company data always remains under your own control. Pleasant, because it allows you to benefit from the advantages of the Cloud without having to worry about data security, sensitive information and privacy.

Another good example is speed. For example, are you working with large video files or high-res images and want AI to edit them? With an online AI application, you have to upload these files first, which takes time and storage. When using a local AI application, this is not necessary. So you also work even faster this way.

Interesting for various professionals

Running AI applications locally is of interest to a wide range of professionals:

Software developers: AI can support developers in developing and testing software. By running AI applications locally, they ensure that their organisation's or customers' source code remains secure and remove concerns regarding data breaches.

AI researchers: Running AI models locally allows researchers to experiment with and research AI applications without relying on remote servers. This allows them to increase productivity, while reducing the cost of using external infrastructure.

 Data analysts: The data analysts work with can be sensitive. By running AI applications locally, they can safely deploy them to analyse sensitive information without worrying about this data being leaked.

 Photographers and videographers: Several tools are available that allow photo and video photographers to use AI locally to edit their photos and video footage. This is interesting for reasons including speed, but may also be relevant in terms of cost.

What does it take to run AI-local?

Running AI applications locally requires the right hardware. Important is a powerful CPU and GPU, so you have the processing power that many AI applications need. However, also consider fast storage, so you can write away data at sufficient speed. HP's latest laptops and desktop systems meet these requirements and are specifically optimised to run AI applications.

For instance, the AI PCs feature a Neural Processing Unit (NPU), a processor specifically designed to run machine learning algorithms. The NPUs offer performance of up to 60 Tera Operations per Second (TOPS), allowing AI models to run locally.

Want to know more about how to best use AI? Then check out HERE!