Databricks to Acquire Generative AI Platform MosaicML
- By Paul Mah
- July 05, 2023
Data and AI firm Databricks has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MosaicML, an open-source startup and OpenAI competitor for USD$1.3 billion.
Databricks says the acquisition will make generative AI accessible for every organization, enabling them to build, own and secure generative AI models using their own data.
State-of-the-art models
MosaicML is known for its state-of-the-art MPT large language models (LLMs), which have seen over 3.3 million downloads of MPT-7B and the recently released MPT-30B. Using its LLM, organizations can quickly and cost-effectively build and train state-of-the-art models.
Customers include AI2 (Allen Institute for AI), Generally Intelligent, Hippocratic AI, Replit, and Scatter Labs.
As reported by TechCrunch, the deal will see MosaicML become a part of Databricks Lakehouse Platform, providing generative AI tooling alongside the Databricks’ existing multi-cloud offerings
With automatic optimization, model training can be significantly sped up. And when paired with near linear scaling of resources using Databricks and MosaicML, multi-billion-parameter models can be trained in hours instead of days – which Databricks says will bring the cost down from millions of dollars to mere thousands.
According to Naveen Rao, the co-founder and CEO of MosaicML, MosaicML was started to solve the hard engineering and research problems necessary to make large-scale training more accessible to everyone.
And joining forces with Databricks will help MosaicML turn the latter’s belief that everyone is empowered to build and train their models into a reality, says Rao.
“Every organization should be able to benefit from the AI revolution with more control over how their data is used. Databricks and MosaicML have an incredible opportunity to democratize AI and make the Lakehouse the best place to build generative AI and LLMs,” said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks.
“Databricks and MosaicML’s shared vision, rooted in transparency and a history of open source contributions, will deliver value to our customers as they navigate the biggest computing revolution of our time.”
MosaicML’s platform will be supported, scaled, and integrated over time to offer customers a seamless unified platform where they can build, own and secure their generative AI models.
Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: MosaicML
Paul Mah
Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends, where he report on the latest developments in data science and AI. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose.