Databricks Strikes $1.3B Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML
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Re: Databricks Strikes $1.3B Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML
#2Re: Databricks Strikes $1.3B Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML
#3I can’t help but feel this is mostly hype driven by a company that’s looking to reinvent themselves while facing the prospect of irrelevance. The piece reads like it’s a press release, with abstract things such as “corporate leaders under pressure to get their data ready for AI”. That has nothing to do with LLMs, as the current AI “hype” cycle has been going on for almost a decade already. Corporate leaders have always been under pressure to get their data cleaned and in the correct shape, and Databricks’ business model is to sell to these corporate leaders expensive packages combined with consultancy with generally very high operational costs. Compared to 5 years ago, nowadays I rarely encounter people that actually care about Databricks’ product offering.
Re: Databricks Strikes $1.3B Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML
#4I can’t help but feel this is mostly hype driven by a company that’s looking to reinvent themselves while facing the prospect of irrelevance. The piece reads like it’s a press release, with abstract things such as “corporate leaders under pressure to get their data ready for AI”. That has nothing to do with LLMs, as the current AI “hype” cycle has been going on for almost a decade already. Corporate leaders have alwa…
A rising tide lifts all boats.
Databricks may have its thunder stolen by snowflake. But the true AI boom happening right now, benefits many data product vendors.
The basic requirement for enterprises to use LLMs is having their data in order, which basically requires a cloud data warehouse. It is simply responsible to profit off the hype for a established data company.
Re: Databricks Strikes $1.3B Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML
#5This $1.3B dollar figure is surely relative to Databricks 2021 valuation from their Series H (most recent round), and doesn’t represent real money since multiples have plunged since then
Estimates of Databricks revenue is $400M and “valuation” of $36B, which would never hold today
Re: Databricks Strikes $1.3B Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML
#6I can’t help but feel this is mostly hype driven by a company that’s looking to reinvent themselves while facing the prospect of irrelevance. The piece reads like it’s a press release, with abstract things such as “corporate leaders under pressure to get their data ready for AI”. That has nothing to do with LLMs, as the current AI “hype” cycle has been going on for almost a decade already. Corporate leaders have alwa…
As someone new to the data ops platform world.. what does Databricks even do? They get so much hype as a great employer, but why are they attracting people if their secret sauce is irrelevant?
Re: Databricks Strikes $1.3B Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML
#7I can’t help but feel this is mostly hype driven by a company that’s looking to reinvent themselves while facing the prospect of irrelevance. The piece reads like it’s a press release, with abstract things such as “corporate leaders under pressure to get their data ready for AI”. That has nothing to do with LLMs, as the current AI “hype” cycle has been going on for almost a decade already. Corporate leaders have alwa…
This was my guess as well. I am wondering what you see as the "prospect of irrelevance" they are facing. I have my guess but I would like to hear your take.
Re: Databricks Strikes $1.3B Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML
#8Congrats to the MosaicML and wish all the luck! If anyone is interested in MosaicML alternatives, check out dstack, we are building its OSS and cloud-agnostic alternative: https://dstack.ai.
Disclaimer: I'm the founder and CEO at dstack.
Re: Databricks Strikes $1.3B Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML
#9Turns out Databricks couldn't do it all internally with just training the dolly model.
I think it's a good accretive deal because Databricks already has a good number of enterprise relationships and Mosaics key offering has been training software with their own optimizations that increase gpu efficiency.
Re: Databricks Strikes $1.3B Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML
#10I can’t help but feel this is mostly hype driven by a company that’s looking to reinvent themselves while facing the prospect of irrelevance. The piece reads like it’s a press release, with abstract things such as “corporate leaders under pressure to get their data ready for AI”. That has nothing to do with LLMs, as the current AI “hype” cycle has been going on for almost a decade already. Corporate leaders have alwa…
I don't know if I'd say this is reinventing themselves, or at least not from the ground up, they've been somewhat active in the open source LLM scene for some time now. Not that releasing dolly alone caused some major foundational shift, but it was a solid contribution. Additionally, acquiring Mosaic fills a pretty gaping hole in their existing product offering. The whole process of pretraining, fine-tuning, and evaluating open source LLMs in production is a total nightmare currently. Mosaic's stack at least attempts to make that better (on top of releasing solid foundational models themselves).
> “corporate leaders under pressure to get their data ready for AI”. That has nothing to do with LLMs
I agree that its buzzwordy and a little abstract. But also in my experience, getting "data ready for AI" is actually the primary constraint many orgs have with respect to using LLMs in an enterprise context. Their data is not stored in a way thats easy to tokenize/label/embed for effective training or fine-tuning. And you could argue the preprocessing actually should the easy part for non-ML devs to tackle, as its primarily a software engineering problem. Yet, its still the thing that keeps many folks from getting started (before you even get to attempt to tackle the inference problem).