Snowflake Arctic

Snowflake Arctic: The Pinnacle of Open, Enterprise-Grade AI

Welcome to the next frontier of artificial intelligence, engineered for the enterprise. Meet Snowflake Arctic, a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) developed by the data cloud powerhouse, Snowflake. Arctic isn’t just another model; it’s a uniquely efficient and powerfully intelligent system designed to be truly open. Built with a groundbreaking Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, it delivers top-tier performance for complex enterprise workloads like SQL generation, coding, and instruction following, all while being incredibly cost-effective to operate. It represents a major leap forward in making elite AI accessible and practical for businesses everywhere.

What Can Snowflake Arctic Do?

Snowflake Arctic is a master of text and code, purpose-built to tackle the most demanding enterprise challenges. Unlike multi-modal models, Arctic hones its expertise in the domains that matter most to businesses, delivering unparalleled quality and efficiency in its specialized areas.

• World-Class SQL Generation: Seamlessly translate natural language questions into complex, accurate SQL queries. This empowers anyone in your organization to interact with data without needing to be a SQL expert.
• Advanced Code Generation: Accelerate development cycles by generating high-quality code in various programming languages, including Python. It’s a powerful copilot for your engineering teams.
• Superior Instruction Following: Arctic excels at understanding and executing nuanced, multi-step instructions, making it a reliable engine for building sophisticated AI applications and agents.
• Enterprise-Grade Text Understanding: From summarizing lengthy reports to answering complex questions based on your internal documentation, Arctic provides robust text analysis and generation capabilities.

Key Features That Set Arctic Apart

Arctic’s design philosophy combines openness with enterprise-grade performance, resulting in a unique set of features.

A Truly Open Model

Released under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, Snowflake Arctic grants you full access to the model’s weights and code. This means you have the freedom to use, customize, and deploy it for commercial purposes without restrictions, fostering innovation and transparency.

Revolutionary Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Architecture

Arctic utilizes a dense-MoE hybrid transformer architecture. While it boasts a massive 480 billion parameters, it intelligently activates only 128 billion during inference. Think of it as a team of specialized experts where only the relevant ones are called upon for a given task. This results in dramatically higher efficiency and lower computational costs compared to dense models of a similar size.

Unmatched Training Efficiency

Thanks to its innovative architecture, Arctic was trained with a significantly smaller compute budget than other leading models. This efficiency translates directly to lower operational costs when you deploy and fine-tune it for your specific needs.

Seamless Snowflake Ecosystem Integration

As a first-party model, Arctic is deeply integrated into the Snowflake Data Cloud via Snowflake Cortex AI. This allows you to bring world-class AI directly to your governed data, building applications securely and at scale without moving data out of your environment.

Snowflake Arctic Pricing: Open and Flexible

Understanding Arctic’s pricing is simple because the model itself is fundamentally free and open.

• Open Source Model: Free. You can download the model weights and code at no cost under the Apache 2.0 license.
• Self-Hosted Deployment: The primary cost is your own infrastructure. You pay for the compute resources (e.g., GPUs on AWS, Azure, or GCP) required to host and run the model.
• Snowflake Cortex AI: For the most seamless experience, you can use Arctic as a serverless function within Snowflake. In this case, you pay based on Snowflake’s consumption-based pricing, with no upfront costs—you only pay for what you use.

Who is Snowflake Arctic For?

Arctic is designed for a wide range of technical and business professionals who want to leverage cutting-edge AI on their own terms.

• Data Scientists & Analysts: Automate data preparation, generate intricate SQL for analysis, and build predictive models more efficiently.
• Software Developers & AI Engineers: Build custom AI-powered applications, copilots, and agents with a powerful, open, and customizable foundation.
• Enterprise AI Teams: Deploy a state-of-the-art LLM within a secure, governed environment, fine-tuning it on proprietary data to create a competitive advantage.
• Researchers: Explore the frontiers of MoE architecture with a massive, high-quality, and fully accessible model.

Snowflake Arctic vs. The Competition

How does Arctic stack up against other popular LLMs?

vs. Llama 3 & Other Dense Models

While models like Meta’s Llama 3 are incredibly powerful, they use a “dense” architecture, meaning all parameters are active at once. Arctic’s MoE approach makes it far more computationally efficient for inference, offering comparable or better intelligence at a fraction of the operational cost, especially for enterprise-specific tasks.

vs. Mixtral & Other MoE Models

Arctic stands out in the growing field of MoE models like Mixtral through its sheer scale and enterprise focus. With a much larger parameter count (480B total), it’s designed for a higher ceiling of intelligence on complex enterprise reasoning. Its deep integration with the Snowflake platform provides a secure, end-to-end solution that other standalone models cannot match.

vs. Closed Models (GPT-4, Claude 3)

The key differentiator is openness and control. While closed models offer high performance, they come with API costs, data privacy concerns, and limited customizability. With Arctic, you control the deployment environment, own your custom models, and ensure your proprietary data remains secure, all while achieving elite-level performance.