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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

#21

Post by gk1 »

tedivm wrote: post #16
paulsutter wrote: post #5

This $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

Databricks wasn't the one purchased, MosaicML was. Mosaic's last round had a valuation of $136m, so this is a pretty big jump for them.

The Databricks valuation is relevant if any part of the acquisition was paid for in Databricks equity.

Re: Databricks Strikes $1.3B Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML

#22

Post by Zizizizz »

ShamelessC wrote: post #20

What do these companies do? I consider myself mildly well versed in the ML space at least, but I’ve never heard of MosaicML before (have they trained anything popular?). I’ve heard of Databricks but know very little about what service they provided before/after the recent deep learning craze.

Databricks provides Jupyter lab like notebooks for analysis and ETL pipelines using spark through pyspark, sparkql or scala. I think R is supported as well but it doesn't interop as well with their newer features as well as python and SQL do. It interfaces with cloud storage backend like S3 and offers some improvements to the parquet format of data querying that allows for updating, ordering and merged through https://delta.io . They integrate pretty seamlessly to other data visualisation tooling if you want to use it for that but their built in graphs are fine for most cases. They also have ML on rails type through menus and models if I recall but I typically don't use it for that. I've typically used it for ETL or ELT type workflows for data that's too big or isn't stored in a database.

Re: Databricks Strikes $1.3B Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML

#23

Post by stakhanov »

ethbr0 wrote: post #17
spmurrayzzz wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eval…

From my understanding, Databrick's core value proposition is -- 'We let you do things you want to, with the people you have .' It may surprise HN to learn, but most companies don't have top-tier technical talent. Consequently, how do you do {cutting edge thing board and investors are demanding company do} with the people you have/can afford? Use an offering that decreases the necessary skill level by providing powerf…

> [...] LLM integration [...] is something every company is being asked to have a plan on, but one few are technically staffed to execute on their own.

But this is still the "language of hype". LLM integration to do what? I'm not saying they're not doing anything useful, just that this is not a way to describe either a productivity-enhancing technology (feature) or an actual value proposition (benefit) in a meaningful way.

Re: Databricks Strikes $1.3B Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML

#24

Post by ShamelessC »

Zizizizz wrote: post #22
ShamelessC wrote: post #20

What do these companies do? I consider myself mildly well versed in the ML space at least, but I’ve never heard of MosaicML before (have they trained anything popular?). I’ve heard of Databricks but know very little about what service they provided before/after the recent deep learning craze.

Databricks provides Jupyter lab like notebooks for analysis and ETL pipelines using spark through pyspark, sparkql or scala. I think R is supported as well but it doesn't interop as well with their newer features as well as python and SQL do. It interfaces with cloud storage backend like S3 and offers some improvements to the parquet format of data querying that allows for updating, ordering and merged through https:…

Thanks!

Re: Databricks Strikes $1.3B Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML

#25

Post by underlines »

Coincidentally this comes after MosaicML released the best open source commercially usable LLMs on huggingface: mpt-30b, the first open source LLM with 8k context length that can be extended even further with ALiBi and has been trained on a whopping 1 trillion tokens vs. 300 billion for Pythia and OpenLLaMA, and 800 billion for StableLM.

Re: Databricks Strikes $1.3B Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML

#26

Post by bryan0 »

kadomony wrote: post #6
stingraycharles wrote: post #3

I 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?

Databricks was founded by the creators of Apache Spark, and their platform is a fully hosted spark solution. Spark is a flexible distributed computing framework which came as a successor to Hadoop and map/reduce. Spark processes big data at scale on clusters, this includes ML training and inference pipelines. Now though, their value prop is less clear since you can implement these pipelines (for example using AWS sagemaker) without having to learn spark.

Re: Databricks Strikes $1.3B Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML

#27

Post by antonvs »

stakhanov wrote: post #23
ethbr0 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my understanding, Databrick's core value proposition is -- 'We let you do things you want to, with the people you have .' It may surprise HN to learn, but most companies don't have top-tier technical talent. Consequently, how do you do {cutting edge thing board and investors are demanding company do} with the people you have/can afford? Use an offering that decreases the necessary skill level by providing powerf…

> [...] LLM integration [...] is something every company is being asked to have a plan on, but one few are technically staffed to execute on their own. But this is still the "language of hype". LLM integration to do what ? I'm not saying they're not doing anything useful, just that this is not a way to describe either a productivity-enhancing technology (feature) or an actual value proposition (benefit) in a meaningf…

> this is not how you describe a meaningful value proposition.

It depends who you're selling to. If customers are asking for a way to deal with LLMs, then providing that is a perfectly fine value proposition. The "do what" is going to depend on the customer.

Re: Databricks Strikes $1.3B Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML

#28

Post by ethbr0 »

stakhanov wrote: post #23
ethbr0 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my understanding, Databrick's core value proposition is -- 'We let you do things you want to, with the people you have .' It may surprise HN to learn, but most companies don't have top-tier technical talent. Consequently, how do you do {cutting edge thing board and investors are demanding company do} with the people you have/can afford? Use an offering that decreases the necessary skill level by providing powerf…

> [...] LLM integration [...] is something every company is being asked to have a plan on, but one few are technically staffed to execute on their own. But this is still the "language of hype". LLM integration to do what ? I'm not saying they're not doing anything useful, just that this is not a way to describe either a productivity-enhancing technology (feature) or an actual value proposition (benefit) in a meaningf…

Investors don't understand AI past "It will change things." Which means there needs to be a plan to deal with change.

What the end deliverable of the plan is doesn't matter: effectively it's the company demonstrating it can "do AI," so that if it becomes existentially necessary, the company's ability to execute is already known.

Absent demonstration, hell, the company might not even be retaining useful historical data. (E.g. theft data at a major US retailer)

Re: Databricks Strikes $1.3B Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML

#29

Post by jncraton »

underlines wrote: post #25

Coincidentally this comes after MosaicML released the best open source commercially usable LLMs on huggingface: mpt-30b, the first open source LLM with 8k context length that can be extended even further with ALiBi and has been trained on a whopping 1 trillion tokens vs. 300 billion for Pythia and OpenLLaMA, and 800 billion for StableLM.

OpenLLaMA models up to 13B parameters have now been trained on 1T tokens:

https://github.com/openlm-research/open_llama

Re: Databricks Strikes $1.3B Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML

#30

Post by brentm »

paulsutter wrote: post #5

This $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

I heard Ali the CEO of Databricks speaking on a podcast recently and stated their revenue last year was north of 1B.
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