(This submit is a part of my “This Week in AI” sequence, which is basic off-the-cuff market commentary. I’m not an investor in both MosaicML or Databricks)
$21M per worker. That’s the value Databricks is paying for MosaicML — a complete of $1.3B for 62 staff (in Databricks inventory, and in addition contains worker retention packages).
One factor is evident – in the event you’re going to be aggressively buying Generative AI startups, you’re going to need to pay up
However it might grow to be low-cost in the long run given the scale of the chance.
That’s as a result of, past any Generative AI capabilities, Databricks’ transfer must be understood within the broader context of its fierce rivalry with Snowflake.
(Some features of that rivalry are slightly foolish – they (mysteriously) scheduled their huge conferences on the identical actual dates this week.)
Each are vying to be the brand new information clouds, essentially the most gigantic enterprise market.
It’s develop into apparent that profitable that market means being the very best information repository (warehouse, information lake, information lakehouse) AND the place the place enterprises do all their information science and ML/AI work.
Each Databricks and Snowflake have been beefing up their ML/AI capabilities.
A few of it’s homegrown: Databricks traditionally has had an ML/AI providing. It additionally just lately launched Dolly, its personal LLM.
A few of it’s by means of partnerships: for instance, Dataiku, the main pure play enterprise AI platform for World 2000 corporations, is a high ML/AI associate for each corporations.
A few of it’s by means of acquisitions: Snowflake acquired Streamlit for $800M final yr and AI search firm Neeva for $150M this yr. Databricks has made a number of acquisitions as effectively, MosaicML being the most important one to this point.
The chess (and thoughts) video games between Snowflake and Databricks are fascinating – and there’s much more coming!
Notice: I’m simply utilizing the value per worker as a proxy to point it is a huge acquisition for a nonetheless small firm. I’m not suggesting the acquisition was an acqui-hire – I don’t have direct data of what Mosaic had constructed up to now aside from what’s within the press, but it surely appeared promising.
