Snowflake Inc. has announced the public preview of Cortex Analyst, a new tool that allows users to analyze records in its cloud data platform using natural language prompts.
Typically, modifying a dashboard or conducting an analysis that it doesn’t support requires assistance from the data science team, which can be time-consuming.
Cortex Analyst is designed to help customers avoid such delays by enabling business users to instruct the tool to perform analyses, which it then automatically translates into SQL queries that can run on Snowflake.
Customers can access Cortex Analyst through Streamlit in Snowflake, a no-code interface for running queries, or via an API that allows developers to integrate it into their software.
Cortex Analyst is powered by large language models from Mistral AI SAS and Meta Platforms Inc.’s Llama series, and customers can also use OpenAI models deployed on Microsoft Azure. The process of using these LLMs to turn user prompts into queries involves several steps.
The tool first instructs each large language model to generate SQL code to perform the user’s requested analysis.
Cortex Analyst then runs the generated queries through an automated debugging module called the Error Correction Agent, which can detect situations where the language model attempts to use hallucinated commands not part of SQL syntax.
Once the code errors are fixed, the Synthesizer Agent distills the queries into a single code snippet that can carry out the user’s requested analysis.
LLMs have historically struggled to generate accurate SQL code, with AI-generated SQL queries being accurate in only 20% to 70% of cases, depending on the complexity of the task.
Snowflake’s Cortex Analyst was built with these reliability challenges in mind, using relatively simple schemas to avoid confusing the LLMs on which it relies to generate queries.
Snowflake has designed Cortex Analyst to avoid processing user queries that may be too complex for its language models, instead suggesting alternative queries that can be confidently answered.
Snowflake plans to enhance Cortex Analyst with support for multi-turn chat interactions and the ability to perform more complex data processing tasks, which will be rolled out in the coming quarter.
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