+Comment Two years ago, before ChatGPT turned the tech industry on its head, Juniper CEO Rami Rahim boasted that by 2027 artificial intelligence would completely automate the network.
ArubaOS Switch – Control Plane Policing (CoPP) for 3810/5400R
Juniper will become part of the Hewlett Packard Enterprise IT empire late this year or early next year, and the dream of self-configuring networks is still very much alive. On Tuesday, Aruba, HPE's wired and wireless LAN division, revealed that it had begun baking standalone large language models into its control plane.
At least for now, network administrators don't have to worry about being automated out of a job. These LLMs—apparently developed in-house by HPE on a dataset of support documents, three million customer inquiries, and other data collected over the years—don't make any decisions on their own yet.
Instead, the LLMs are part of Aruba Network Central's AI search function. In other words, it's basically a chatbot baked into the search bar at the top of the web interface. Type in a question and LLM spits back a contextualized answer – or so you hope.
