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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

#31

Post by stakhanov »

ethbr0 wrote: post #28
stakhanov wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] 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 dat…

Well, there was a time when making XML-related software would have been a driver of valuations of companies in a similar way, and engineers were asked by boards to "start doing XML".

I'm not even saying it's unmitigatedly a negative thing. When the question "What are we going to actually do with XML?" came up, many had good ideas, and useful tech investments started getting past boards that wouldn't otherwise have. -- So there was a lot of "collateral goodness".

But people also started ripping out databases and purpose-built DSLs from existing applications just so they could replace them with something XML-based.

As a way of making tech investments, it's weak. If it's 1999 and I'm asked to invest in a tech company that makes a damned good XML parser and nothing else, I'm well advised to not invest. And if I'm a CTO in a non-tech business asked to start replacing database servers with XML files, I'm well advised to not do it.

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

#32

Post by brucethemoose2 »

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.

Is it better than Falcon 40B?

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

#33

Post by pram »

moneywoes wrote: post #12
kadomony wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Further, what is it different from snowflake that they do?

The biggest difference to consider is storage, I guess. Databricks clusters can store in S3 or wherever you want really. Snowflake has their own storage layer and it always lives in their cloud. This precludes any on-prem deployments.

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

#34

Post by brucethemoose2 »

poomer wrote: post #15

This class of startup, "build domain specific LLMS using your own data", is extremely crowded right now but I am not optimistic about their future. For large companies, the actual modeling work for this is already easy for any ML team, thanks to existing FOSS work on stuff like PEFT and LoRA. The hard part is figuring out what data goes into the fine tuning process and how to get this data in a usable form, but this…

> thanks to existing FOSS work on stuff like PEFT and LoRA

YMMV. Sometimes a LORA is fine, but sometimes a full finetune is necessary for higher quality output.

That being said, backwards pass free training keeps making more and more progress. Seems like a short matter of time before it becomes practical.

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

#35

Post by pletnes »

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…

What has replaced Databricks, in your opinion? Doesn’t seem «dead» to me, yet. Serious question.

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

#36

Post by ramraj07 »

pram wrote: post #33
moneywoes wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Further, what is it different from snowflake that they do?

The biggest difference to consider is storage, I guess. Databricks clusters can store in S3 or wherever you want really. Snowflake has their own storage layer and it always lives in their cloud. This precludes any on-prem deployments.

You can’t be more wrong? Snowflake also stores in s3 or elsewhere, in fact it’s like the only common feature. Snowflake uses proprietary formats mostly though and only gives a sql interface. Think of it as Apple vs android.

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

#37

Post by brucethemoose2 »

Falcon 7B/40B is good, but hasn't really caught on like LLaMA has. One big reason is that its not well supported by 4-bit inference code (namely llama.cpp and GPTQ).

Mosaic's 7B (and 30B?) models have the same issue, and 7B kinda paled in comparison to LLaMA 7B... But maybe it would be better if finetuned?

To me, its kinda baffling that Mosaic didn't work on adding highly quantized inference to the popular frameworks.

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

#38

Post by huac »

cheptsov wrote: post #8

Congrats 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.

It would be really cool to support more vendors (eg Lambda Labs, Runpod, etc) - getting GPU availability feels like 'any port in a storm' sometimes :)

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

#39

Post by tsunamifury »

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:…

Now say it even dumber as if I were a dog or a ceo.

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

#40

Post by jamesblonde »

pram wrote: post #33
moneywoes wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Further, what is it different from snowflake that they do?

The biggest difference to consider is storage, I guess. Databricks clusters can store in S3 or wherever you want really. Snowflake has their own storage layer and it always lives in their cloud. This precludes any on-prem deployments.

Databricks are not on-premises either.
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