BREAKING NEWS — Databricks reached an agreement Monday to acquire MosaicML for $1.3 billion to add new generative AI capabilities.
MosaicML is a generative AI vendor. Its platform enables organizations to develop and secure generative AI and language models using their own data, rather than data provided by generative AI or large language models such as ChatGPT and Google Bard.
The San Francisco-based vendor was founded in 2021 and has raised $37 million in venture capital.
Databricks, on the other hand, is a data lakehouse vendor whose platform combines the structured data storage capabilities of a data warehouse with the unstructured data storage capabilities of a data lake.
This fusion eliminates the need for organizations to move data back and forth between systems to combine disparate data types in preparation for analysis, and combines both structured and unstructured, even semi-structured data into one be managed by the system.
When MosaicML’s platform is combined with Databricks, data lakehouse vendor customers can securely develop and train language models tailored to their needs using their own data stored within the secure Databricks environment. You will be able to
Databricks not only acquires the MosaicML platform, but also inherits the MosaicML leadership team, including co-founder and CEO Naveen Rao.
The promise of generative AI and LLM technologies in analytics and data management is to expand the use of analytics within organizations beyond just data professionals and enable more efficient data management.
The prevalence of analytics within organizations has been stagnant for decades, with only about a quarter of employees. Even recent technological advances such as natural language processing and low-code/no-code tools have failed to make data analysis accessible beyond those with data literacy training.
Insufficient NLP vocabulary is an obstacle and requires training to use even low-code/no-code safely and effectively.
But now, generative AI and LLM technology may make the data literacy training previously required to work with data unnecessary.
Launched by OpenAI in November 2022, ChatGPT and other generative AI platforms have much larger vocabularies, allowing free-form language usage rather than specific business expressions.
This will probably allow more people in your organization to work with your data. Data professionals, on the other hand, benefit from not having to write the large amounts of code required to develop data pipelines or build and train data models.
As a result, in the months since ChatGPT was first released, many data management and analytics vendors, including Databricks, have announced capabilities that combine existing tools with generative AI.
Three months before agreeing to acquire MosaicML, the vendor announced Dolly, an open-source large-scale language model similar to ChatGPT.
The report is in progress — more details to come.
Eric Avidon is a Senior News Writer for TechTarget Editorial and a journalist with over 25 years of experience. He is responsible for analytics and data management.
