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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

#51

Post by aynyc »

pletnes wrote: post #35
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.

Their moat was to be able to spin up spark clusters for you. This was very useful when companies just starting in that space and don’t have the skills. But with K8s and clusters becoming more common for normal workload, it’s not hard to manage your own spark clusters anymore. There goes their moat. Their other offerings just aren’t that amazing. People now don’t just want to buy hand tools anymore, they want power tools. AI/ML and its cousins are in the power tool space.

Databrick cost is stupid high, like snowflake. Any companies looking to chop budget would put those contracts up first.

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

#52

Post by cfeduke »

jamesblonde wrote: post #40
pram wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Databricks are not on-premises either.

Usually, no. But in some cases, yes.

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

#53

Post by cfeduke »

ramraj07 wrote: post #36
pram wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You can’t be more wrong? Snowflake also stores in s3 or elsewhere

Snowflake stores data in S3 in Snowflake's various AWS accounts. Egress fees are necessary when performing anything outside of Snowflake.

Databricks operates on data stored in your S3 on your AWS account(s). Databricks also runs on your compute contained within your AWS account(s).

Both approaches have valid use cases.

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

#54

Post by pram »

ramraj07 wrote: post #36
pram wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not in your account.

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

#55

Post by enumjorge »

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?

As far as being an attractive employer they pay really well. Not sure about other dimensions. This is anecdotal but a couple of people in my network had bad things to say about the work life balance and culture there.

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

#56

Post by woeirua »

How old was MosaicML? How many customers did they have? Revenue? Profits? This feels like pure hype for LLMs to be honest. Good for the founders of MosaicML to exit at the top, but I'd bet good money that DataBricks winds up writing this off in a year or two max.

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

#57

Post by brucethemoose2 »

Tostino wrote: post #49
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #37

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…

Falcon is also slow for inference compared to LLaMA models of similar size. Speed can turn into a quality all its own when you break up problems into small pieces and use the LLM to iterate.

Thats because its unoptimized, right? My impression is that the Falcon GPTQ (and 8 bit bnb inference?) code is just immature.

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

#58

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

aynyc wrote: post #51
pletnes wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Their moat was to be able to spin up spark clusters for you. This was very useful when companies just starting in that space and don’t have the skills. But with K8s and clusters becoming more common for normal workload, it’s not hard to manage your own spark clusters anymore. There goes their moat. Their other offerings just aren’t that amazing. People now don’t just want to buy hand tools anymore, they want power to…

Their moat is their phenomenal sales team.

Like, I'm at company 3 that pays for databricks.

Amount of those companies that use Spark = 0.

I've given up complaining now.

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

#59

Post by quickthrower2 »

tsunamifury wrote: post #39
Zizizizz wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps, it is a fancy .csv importer?

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

#60

Post by jrott »

pram wrote: post #54
ramraj07 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not in your account.

The compute itself can be in your account. The control plane is usually managed by databricks
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