MosiacML’s $1.3 billion acquisition of Databricks to boost generative AI offerings – News Block

Data lake provider Databricks said on Monday it was acquiring large language model (LLM) and model training software provider MosiacML for $1.3 billion to boost its generative AI offerings.

Databricks, which already offers an LLM called Dolly, is expected to add MosiacML’s models, training and inference capabilities to its Lakehouse platform for companies to develop generative AI applications, the company said, underlining its code LLM policy. open.

Dolly was developed on open datasets to meet the demand from enterprises to control LLMs used to develop new applications, in contrast to closed-loop trained models, such as ChatGPT, which place restrictions on commercial use.

The MosiacML models, namely the MPT-7B and the recently released MPT-30B, are open source, bringing them in line with existing Databricks policy.

Another advantage of these models, according to MosiacML, is the “zero human intervention” feature that allows training systems to be automated.

“We trained MPT-7B without human intervention from start to finish: over 9.5 days on 440 GPUs, the MosaicML platform detected and addressed 4 hardware failures and resumed training execution automatically and due to architecture and optimization improvements that we did, there were no catastrophic loss spikes,” MosiacML wrote in a blog post.

The deal calls for the entire MosiacML team of more than 60 employees, including co-founding CEO Naveen Rao, to move to Databricks, where they will continue to work on developing more basic models, the companies said.

Existing MosiacML customers, according to a company post, will still be able to access their LLMs and inference offerings. Existing clients include the Allen Institute for AI, Generally Intelligent, Hippocratic AI, Replit, and Scatter Labs. The San Francisco-based startup, which was founded in 2021, has raised nearly $64 million to date from investors including Lux Capital, DCVC, Future Ventures, Maverick Ventures and Playground.

The $1.3 billion deal includes retention packages for MosiacML employees, Databricks said.

In May, the company acquired AI-focused data governance platform provider Okera for an undisclosed sum.

Databrick’s acquisition of MosiacML also comes just weeks after rival Snowflake acquired Neeva, a Mountain View-based AI startup, in an effort to add AI-powered generative search to its Data Cloud platform. .