**Databricks to Acquire MosaicML: Making Generative AI Accessible to All**
**Databricks Announces Acquisition of MosaicML**
San Francisco-based Data and AI company, Databricks, has announced its definitive agreement to acquire MosaicML, a leading platform in generative AI. This acquisition, valued at approximately $1.3 billion, aims to make generative AI accessible to all organizations, empowering them to build, own, and secure their own generative AI models using their proprietary data.
**MosaicML: A Look into the Platform**
MosaicML was founded by Naveen Rao, a former head of artificial intelligence products at Intel and co-founder of Nervana Systems. After Intel discontinued the Nervana AI chip, Rao started MosaicML with a focus on helping companies reduce overhead costs on AI systems. The platform offers easy training and deployment of AI models in a secure environment, with a key differentiator being data security and model ownership. MosaicML has attracted $37 million in venture capital, with investments from Lux Capital, DCVC Playground Global, AME, Correlation, and E14.
**Databricks and MosaicML: Enabling Democratization of AI**
Both Databricks and MosaicML share a vision of democratizing AI and establishing the Lakehouse as the premier environment for building generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs). By leveraging their commitment to transparency and open-source contributions, this collaboration aims to deliver value to customers navigating the transformative AI landscape.
**Benefits of the Joint Offering**
According to Databricks, the joint offering of its Lakehouse Platform and MosaicML’s technology will provide organizations with a simple and rapid approach to retaining control, security, and ownership of their valuable data, all while avoiding high costs. MosaicML’s automatic optimization of model training promises 2-7x faster training speeds compared to conventional methods. Additionally, the scalability of resources ensures that models with billions of parameters can be trained within hours, instead of days. This significantly reduces the cost of training and utilizing LLMs from millions of dollars to the thousands of dollars.
**Joining Forces: Integration of Expert Teams**
Upon completion of the acquisition, the entire MosaicML team, including its research team, will join Databricks. MosaicML’s experts in machine learning and neural networks have been instrumental in advancing generative AI research and contributing to the development of popular open-source foundation models like MPT-30B and the training algorithms powering MosaicML’s products.
**Databricks’ LLMs: Dolly-2 and MPT**
In addition to the acquisition of MosaicML, Databricks already possesses an LLM called Dolly-2, which is a 12-billion-parameter causal language model created by the company. Derived from EleutherAI’s Pythia-12b, Databricks will now offer two leading LLMs: Dolly-2 and MPT, thanks to the integration of MosaicML.
**The Future of Generative AI**
The acquisition of MosaicML marks one of the first major acquisition deals in the emerging generative AI market. Looking ahead, we can expect more M&A transactions in this segment in the second half of 2023.
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