How F5 Is Unlocking the Power of AI

A key component of this data fabric is the AI ecosystem, which is a collection of models, modules, and APIs designed to make machine learning and AI much more accessible to our product teams and users-ridiculously easy, as we say. It accelerates our ability to build AI into our products and go from idea to AI-enabled app super fast.

Here's an example. If you've ever had to train supervised learning models, you know that it requires lots of data, and that data has to be labeled. Finding good, labeled data is a challenge, and labeling data properly can take weeks of toil. That's not fast enough when you're building models to keep up with a rapidly changing threat landscape.

Enter AI and large language models. In order to address this challenge, we take advantage of sentence transformers for vectorizing a training data set, and semantic search to bootstrap and automate the data labeling process. We can use similar techniques to then train and refine a model. Let's say I want to build a classifier to detect SQL injection attacks. With just one example of an attack, the F5 AI Data Fabric can now help walk me through the process of labeling my data, training a model, and packaging it up in a container for deployment. What could previously take days or weeks now takes minutes (and I'm not even a data scientist!).

Once we've trained and deployed that classifier model, we can turn again to AI for help. Using large language models trained to create regular expressions, we can generate signatures that can be deployed out to the edge for real-time detection. Push-button signature generation allows us to respond very quickly as new threats emerge.

Leveraging these capabilities within our AI ecosystem allows us to dramatically shrink the time it takes to build a new detection model and then generate a signature from it. So, we can be super responsive to emerging threats. If there's a new attack type, a subject matter expert can quickly add detection capabilities into the data platform. Generative AI helps us deliver and accelerate better detection, at a lower cost to us and our customers.

And that's just one of the many use cases AI can power for us.