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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

#91

Post by mootline »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #67
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…

> "build domain specific LLMS using your own data", It seems to me that the vast majority of these people would be better off just doing semantic search with their documents chunked, run through an embeddings process, and stored in a vector database, with the search queries and results then run through an LLM at the final step to create an actual "answer". For applications where this is not practical, I agree that Lo…

I wholeheartedly agree with this. Vector databases are easily updatable, searchable by recency, and you can verify where the information came from. Training a custom frozen LLM for every company seems insane. Each company’s data is not that unique - it’s just the numbers that matter, for which you need a vector or traditional database.

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

#92

Post by kentm »

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?

Snowflake only really offers SQL (with UDFs) to do data transforms. Spark offers SQL, but also code-based solutions (Python, Scala, Java) that can be used to scale things like ML pipelines and non-SQL transforms.

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

#93

Post by splendor_spoon »

pletnes wrote: post #90
aynyc wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So Databricks is being replaced by open source, self-managed spark-on-k8s? Broadly speaking? Any concrete recommendations on how to do that in a project?

We tried this at a previous company I was at, it was incredibly tough to maintain and tune. We ended up using databricks which made it significantly more productive.

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

#94

Post by aynyc »

pletnes wrote: post #90
aynyc wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So Databricks is being replaced by open source, self-managed spark-on-k8s? Broadly speaking? Any concrete recommendations on how to do that in a project?

No, it's not about the technology. It's about your stack and skill set. If you are still on the school of one box for all. Then just pay for Databrick or EMR. If you are already running K8s because you invested into that world, then adding Spark isn't a huge jump.

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

#96

Post by hodgesrm »

kthejoker2 wrote: post #84
stingraycharles wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are doing more and more self-hosting and desire PaaS-like offerings that run in their own cloud, rather than SaaS “we manage your spark cluster for you” which is what DataBricks was founded upon. PaaS has significantly thinner margins, but it’s desirable from the customers’ perspective as it’s cheaper and much better from a (data) security point of view. As such, they’ll be forced to do a lot more services ori…

> People are doing more and more self-hosting and desire PaaS-like offerings that run in their own cloud, rather than SaaS Do you have some data to support this? This is a pretty bold claim.

+1. I would be delighted to see that data as well. I mean we all like the idea of local control but local PaaS is hard to do in a general way.

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

#98

Post by [deleted] »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #75
anonylizard wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The basic requirement for enterprises to use LLMs is having their data in order, which basically requires a cloud data warehouse. I'm curious why you would say this. The main use cases for LLMs involve things like customer service chatbots, knowledgebase search, document summarization, co-pilot/code generation, and content generation for product descriptions and marketing emails. The main data sources would be thin…

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