DIRS.INFO The most relevant business & tech news

Since mid-March, the financial pressure on several signature artificial intelligence start-ups has taken a toll. Inflection AI, which raised $1.5 billion but made almost no money, has folded its original business. Stability AI has laid off employees and parted ways with its chief executive. And Anthropic has raced to close the roughly $1.8 billion gap between its modest sales and enormous expenses. “You can already see the writing on the wall,” said Ali Ghodsi, chief executive of Databricks, a data warehouse and analysis company that works with A.I.

Persons: Anthropic, ”, Ali Ghodsi Organizations: Google, Microsoft, Meta, A.I Locations: Silicon Valley

☆ Eric Newcomer is bringing his Cerebral Valley AI Summit to New York
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-15 | by ( Darius Rafieyan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Cerebral Valley New York will be Newcomer's first east coast event. AdvertisementThe Cerebral Valley AI Summit, the generative AI conference created by tech journalist Eric Newcomer and AI startup Volley, will be hosting its first New York event on June 27th. The original Cerebral Valley Summit, held in the Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco in 2023, made headlines for producing one of the largest generative AI acquisitions ever and effectively firing the starting gun on the AI arms race. At the last Cerebral Valley Summit in November, 2023, it was a given that OpenAI had already won the AI battle. At the very first Cerebral Valley AI Summit, Newcomer half-jokingly challenged someone to raise $100 million at the conference.

Persons: —, Eric Newcomer, Mistral, OpenAI, Sam Altman, Altman, Ali Ghodsi, Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla, Anthropic, Daniela Amodei Organizations: Service, New, Google Locations: San Francisco, York, New York, Hayes, Francisco, Europe, MosaicML

☆ Databricks CEO discusses the use cases of its new open-source large language model
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-02 | by ( ) www.cnbc.com time to read: 1 min

Share Share Article via Facebook Share Article via Twitter Share Article via LinkedIn Share Article via EmailDatabricks CEO discusses the use cases of its new open-source large language modelAli Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks, explains what's behind DBRX.

Persons: Ali Ghodsi Locations: DBRX

☆ A new generative AI model could compete with rivals like OpenAI. Say hello to Databricks' DBRX.
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-27 | by ( Lloyd Lee | Darius Rafieyan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Databricks, a cloud-based data software company, launched a new AI model on Wednesday — and the company says it's faster, cheaper, and more efficient than its larger competitors. The model, called DBRX, comes at a time of fierce competition in the generative AI field. DBRX, available as open source, is the culmination of the company's $1.3 billion purchase of AI startup MosaicML last July, as many of its staffers helped build DBRX. Also, the entire DBRX model has 132 billion parameters, the company said. Ghodsi told BI that a team at Databricks was responsible for filtering copyrighted material from the data used to train DBRX.

Persons: —, Ali Ghodsi, Elon Musk's, Databricks, Ghodsi, Patrick Wendell, Wendell, Naveen Rao Organizations: Service, Business, Google, Microsoft Locations: San Francisco ., Databricks

☆ Some VCs are over the Sam Altman hype
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-26 | by ( Darius Rafieyan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +8 min

In late 2023, when OpenAI sought $300 million from investors, CEO Sam Altman chose a different approach. In some corners of this clubby world, over $7 coffee and artisanal cocktails, the meteoric rise of OpenAI and Sam Altman is giving way to an inevitable backlash. "He's a kingmaker," a Silicon Valley startup founder and angel investor who knows Altman. Sam Altman and OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment. A certain somethingMany of the VCs who spoke with BI said Altman has a certain something.

Persons: —, OpenAI, Sam Altman, Altman, they'd, I've, Ali Ghodsi, Altman's, Ghodsi, Steve Jobs's, Paul Graham, he's, Sam, Jack Altman, It's, it's, Elon, Alexander the Great, Adam Neumann Organizations: Service, NEA, Business, Altman's, The Washington Post, The, YC, BI, WeWork Locations: Sequoia, Silicon Valley, The, San Francisco

☆ Exclusive: Databricks acquires startup Lilac AI to beef up its LLM offerings amidst AI arms race
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-19 | by ( Darius Rafieyan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +1 min

CEO Ali Ghodsi says Databricks' research team pushed him to acquire the months-old startup. Lilac helps users find data to train LLMs and assess the data coming out of them. This comes as Databricks looks to build out its AI offerings amid simmering rivalry with OpenAI. AdvertisementAt Databricks' recent year-end offsite in Napa, CEO Ali Ghodsi said members of the company's research team were "banging on the table" encouraging Ghodsi to acquire AI data platform Lilac AI. This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers.

Persons: Ali Ghodsi, — Organizations: OpenAI, Service, Google Software, Business Locations: Napa

☆ The breathtaking scope of Sam Altman's future AI empire
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-07 | by ( Darius Rafieyan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +9 min

If Sam Altman is to achieve his dream of artificial general intelligence in his lifetime, that number will need to double or triple every year for the foreseeable future. These wide-ranging plans for global transformation go far beyond Altman's role as the CEO of generative AI behemoth OpenAI, developer of ChatGPT. EnergyThe first pillar of Altman's grand unified theory of the future rests on energy. Headlining the event was company chairman and investor Sam Altman, who appeared via video call projected on a towered cineplex. And Altman's AGI empire extends beyond just the energy and raw material required to build AGI.

Persons: Sam Altman, he's, Altman, it's, Max, Jack, Sam himself, Sam, David Kirtley, Helion, He's, Joe Betts Lacroix, Lacroix, where's, Joe Biden, Tade Oyerinde, Oyerinde, Ali Ghodsi, Ghodsi Organizations: Nvidia, Business, Elon, Altman, OpenAI, Energy, Bloomberg, Concorde, Wall Street, Retro Biosciences, Capitol, PAC Locations: Silicon Valley, OpenAI, Davos, New York, Redmond , Washington, Washington

☆ It's 'Moneyball 2.0', says Databricks CEO on assisting the World Series champions this season
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-06 | by ( Jim Cramer | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: 1 min

Share Share Article via Facebook Share Article via Twitter Share Article via LinkedIn Share Article via EmailIt's 'Moneyball 2.0', says Databricks CEO on assisting the World Series champions this seasonDatabricks Co-Founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi joins 'Mad Money' host Jim Cramer to talk the AI boom, if an IPO is in its future and more.

Persons: Ali Ghodsi, Jim Cramer

☆ Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi sits down with Jim Cramer
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-06 | by ( Jim Cramer | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: 1 min

Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi sits down with Jim CramerDatabricks Co-Founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi joins 'Mad Money' host Jim Cramer to talk the AI boom, if an IPO is in its future and more.

Persons: Ali Ghodsi, Jim Cramer Databricks, Jim Cramer

☆ Databricks CEO on client Texas Rangers World Series win: 'It's kind of like Moneyball 2.0'
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-06 | by ( Julie Coleman | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +1 min

In a Monday interview with CNBC's Jim Cramer, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi detailed how the enterprise software company helps its clients, including recent World Series champions, the Texas Rangers. Ghodsi said he'd like to think Databricks had a "tiny little part" in the Texas Rangers' win, likening the company's involvement to the film "Moneyball." The company then used its AI model to analyze this data and was able to make recommendations, perhaps changing a player's pitch slightly. "We run it like a public company, we just happen to not be public," Ghodsi said. Disclosure: Comcast owns NBCUniversal, the parent company of CNBC.

Persons: CNBC's Jim Cramer, Ali Ghodsi, Ghodsi, Databricks Organizations: Texas Rangers, NBC Universal, Comcast, Reuters, CNBC

☆ Elon Musk is in the UK for a pivotal summit on AI — here's who's going
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-01 | by ( Ryan Browne | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +4 min

Here's who's goingMajor names in the technology and political world will be there. They range from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose private jet landed in the U.K. late Tuesday, to U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. What the summit seeks to addressThe main objective of the U.K. AI summit is to find some level of international coordination when it comes to agreeing some principles on the ethical and responsible development of AI models. The summit is squarely focused on so-called "frontier AI" models — in other words, the advanced large language models, or LLMs, like those developed by companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. Loss of control risks refer to a situation in which the AI that humans create could be turned against them.

Persons: Elon Musk, Mandel Ngan, Rishi Sunak's, ChatGPT, Here's who's, Kamala Harris, Musk, Elon, Brad Smith, Demis, Yann LeCun, Global Affairs Nick Clegg, Adam Selipsky, Sam Altman, Dario, Jensen Huang, Rene Haas, Dario Gil Darktrace, Poppy Gustaffson Databricks, Ali Ghodsi, Marc Benioff, Cheun Kyung, Alex Karp, Emmanuel Macron, Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, Olaf Scholz, Sunak, Will Organizations: Senate, Intelligence, U.S, Capitol, Washington , D.C, Afp, Getty, Bletchley, Microsoft, Tesla, CNBC, Global Affairs, Web, Rene Haas IBM, Marc Benioff Samsung, Technology, South, Sony, Joe Biden Canadian Locations: U.S, Washington ,, China, U.K, South Korean, Chesnot

☆ Databricks, the $43 billion analytics firm, acquires data startup Arcion for $100 million
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-23 | by ( Hayden Field | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

Databricks has agreed to acquire Arcion, an enterprise data company, for about $100 million, including incentives, CEO Ali Ghodsi told CNBC ahead of an official Monday announcement. The acquisition comes after Databricks announced a $500 million funding round in September at a valuation of $43 billion. Arcion is Databricks' first acquisition since acquiring MosaicML, an AI infrastructure startup specializing in training large language models, for $1.3 billion. It's part of Databricks' AI push, and partly inspired by the tech sector's growing interest in generative AI, which can require a lot of training data. "We think we can make a lot of revenue on this particular acquisition," Ghodsi said.

Persons: Ali Ghodsi, Databricks, Ghodsi, we're, Rajkumar Sen, Miryana Organizations: Databricks Inc, Bloomberg Technology, CNBC, Oracle, Arcion's Locations: San Francisco

☆ Companies are 'very excited' about AI but aren't ready, software firm says
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-04 | by ( ) www.cnbc.com time to read: 1 min

Share Share Article via Facebook Share Article via Twitter Share Article via LinkedIn Share Article via EmailCompanies are 'very excited' about AI but aren't ready, software firm saysAli Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, discusses large language models in artificial intelligence and whether companies are ready for them.

Persons: Ali Ghodsi Organizations: Companies

☆ Cerebral Valley, the AI conference that spawned a $1.3 billion deal, is coming back to San Francisco this year
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-19 | by ( Alistair Barr | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Cerebral Valley, an AI conference run by Eric Newcomer's eponymous publication, just announced its second gathering of 2023. CVAI2 (Cerebral Valley AI Summit version 2.0) will take place on November 15 at the SFJAZZ Center in Hayes Valley, San Francisco. The neighborhood is nicknamed Cerebral Valley these days, due to the plethora of AI startups that have sprouted there. Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, and Naveen Rao, CEO of MosaicML, met for the first time at the initial Cerebral Valley AI Summit. That's the biggest generative AI startup deal so far, by my counting.

Persons: Vinod Khosla, Reid Hoffman, Adam D'Angelo, Eric Newcomer's, Mustafa Suleyman, Ali Ghodsi, Kanjun Qiu, Chris Lattner, May Habib, Naveen Rao, Jason Warner, Max Child, James Wilsterman, Amjad Masad, Clem Delangue, Emad, Daniela Amodei, Cristobal Valenzuela, Shane Orlick, MosaicML, it's Organizations: SFJAZZ, Service, Industry Locations: Hayes Valley, San Francisco, Wall, Silicon, Jasper

☆ 'We will go public when the time is right', says Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-15 | by ( ) www.cnbc.com time to read: 1 min

In this videoShare Share Article via Facebook Share Article via Twitter Share Article via LinkedIn Share Article via Email'We will go public when the time is right', says Databricks CEO Ali GhodsiAli Ghodsi, Databricks co-founder and CEO, joins 'Closing Bell Overtime' to talk the company's $43 billion valuation, Nvidia's investment in Databricks, the AI boom and more.

Persons: Ali Ghodsi Ali Ghodsi, Databricks Locations: Databricks

As some high-valued tech startups look to the long-dormant IPO market for their next funding round, Databricks is still finding investors that are happy to keep the company private, at least for now. Databricks, which sells data analytics software, said Thursday that it raised more than $500 million in fresh capital at a $43 billion valuation. Founded in 2013 and based in San Francisco, Databricks last announced funding during the boom market of 2021, at a $38 billion valuation. However, unlike fellow software IPO candidates Canva and Stripe, Databricks has managed to maintain its share price. In the latest round, shares were sold at $73.50 a piece, roughly equal to where they were priced in 2021.

Persons: Databricks, Snowflake, Ali Ghodsi, Headcount Organizations: Nvidia Locations: San Francisco, Databricks

The new round, led by T. Rowe Price, could mark the last round of private funding as the data company gears up for the public market. Chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA.O), another beneficiary of the AI boom, and credit card firm Capital One Financial (COF.N), also participated in the latest funding round. AI, the latest buzzword in the technology space, has captivated the interest of investors from Silicon Valley to Wall Street. Its latest valuation is over 13% more than the $38 billion the San Francisco-based company was worth after its last fundraise in 2021. The company has raised $4 billion since inception.

Persons: Rowe Price, Ali Ghodsi, Ghodsi, Andreessen Horowitz, Baillie Gifford, Morgan, Weeks, Databricks, Niket, Krystal Hu, Dhanya Ann Thoppil Organizations: Nvidia, Reuters, Fidelity Management & Research, Tiger Global, Thomson Locations: Silicon Valley, Wall, Francisco, Bengaluru, Hong Kong

☆ I run a $38 billion software company. In 10 years, CEOs who don't understand data and AI won't be eligible for the top job in any industry.
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-16 | by ( Ellen Thomas | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, a cloud-based data and AI company, says AI is "eating software." This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ali Ghodsi, CEO of cloud-based data and AI company Databricks. Every company is now a software company. Industries that you traditionally might not have thought were software industries — healthcare, retail, finance — all of it is software. The leading companies in the future are going to be data and AI companies — healthcare, retail, you name it.

Persons: Ali Ghodsi, Marc Andreessen, Andreessen, Databricks, we've, Uber, Ashley Davis Organizations: Morning, Industries, AIs, Facebook Locations: Databricks

☆ Alone in an Empty House, Female Real Estate Agents Face Danger
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-08 | by ( Debra Kamin | More About Debra Kamin | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Across the nation, the overwhelming majority of real estate agents are women — and they are vulnerable to abuse in an industry that offers few protections, demands that they meet clients alone in empty homes and encourages them to use their appearance to help bring in buyers. Reports of harassment and occasionally physical violence, including rape and even murder, highlight the risks they face. But the industry is also structured so that 90 percent of agents are not actually employees of the agencies they work with. They are independent contractors, which means they are not protected under Title VII — the federal law that prohibits discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace. It also means that many real estate agencies that rely on these agents for the vast majority of their income do not feel obligated — or even inclined — to offer them any kind of institutional protection or training.

Persons: —, VII Organizations: National Association of Realtors

☆ Databricks rolls out AI assistant to help analyze business data
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-28 | by ( Stephen Nellis | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

June 28 (Reuters) - Databricks on Wednesday introduced an artificial intelligence assistant intended to help business users ask complicated questions about their corporate data in everyday language. Behind the scenes, an AI system will interpret the question, fetch the needed data, read it and produce an answer. Ali Ghodsi, chief executive of Databricks, hopes that the AI system will be especially useful because it will be trained on a company's own data, rather than generic data from the internet. That should get the AI quickly up to speed on relevant information like the dates of the company's fiscal year or industry-specific jargon, Databricks believes. By training on the customer's specific data, the new Databricks offering "understands the jargon.

Persons: Databricks, Ali Ghodsi, Ghodsi, Stephen Nellis, Cynthia Osterman Organizations: Adobe Inc, Intel Corp, Databricks, Thomson Locations: San Francisco

☆ MosaicML acquisition will allow us to democratize A.I. for startups, says Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-26 | by ( ) www.cnbc.com time to read: 1 min

Share Share Article via Facebook Share Article via Twitter Share Article via LinkedIn Share Article via EmailMosaicML acquisition will allow us to democratize A.I. for startups, says Databricks CEO Ali GhodsiAli Ghodsi, Databricks CEO, joins 'Closing Bell Overtime' to discuss the company's acquisition of A.I. company MosaicML for $1.3B.

Persons: democratize, Ali Ghodsi Ali Ghodsi Organizations: A.I

☆ A.I. development is happening faster than anything we have ever seen, says Databricks CEO
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-10 | by ( ) www.cnbc.com time to read: 1 min

Share Share Article via Facebook Share Article via Twitter Share Article via LinkedIn Share Article via EmailA.I. development is happening faster than anything we have ever seen, says Databricks CEOAli Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, discusses the developments of AI in health care, technology and jobs and who will benefit from its rise.

☆ Exclusive: $38 billion data and AI darling Databricks acquires security startup Okera
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-03 | by ( Stephanie Palazzolo | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Data and AI company Databricks is acquiring data security startup Okera. Recently, customers have increasingly asked about data security when creating custom AI models. In 2015 and 2016, software engineer Nong Li spent a number of months at data and AI startup Databricks. Databricks plans to integrate Okera deeply in the company, specifically as part of its data and AI governance offering, Unity Catalog, Ghodsi said. Today, Unity Catalog is Databricks' number one priority as it looks to build the end-to-end platform for data, analytics, and AI, Ghodsi said.

Databricks sells software tools for building AI systems. Ghodsi told Reuters that the company is releasing the free training data in the hope that other companies will use it to make their own AI systems, possibly using Databricks to do so. But it could not be used in commercial products because the data used to train the model was generated by OpenAI's ChatGPT, whose terms of service forbid using its data to develop commercial AI systems that could compete with OpenAI. Using data generated by AI to train other AI systems has become common. Users will be able to examine the training data themselves, which they cannot do for models such as ChatGPT or Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Bard, whose training data wasn't released.

The code is an AI model, an algorithm that is trained on sets of data and can then learn from new data to perform a variety of tasks. Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi said the release was aimed at demonstrating a viable alternative to training a kind of AI model called a large language model with enormous resources and computing power. OpenAI, valued at $29 billion, trains its AI models with huge troves of data on a supercomputer from investor Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O). Databricks wants enterprises to train their own AI models using its software. "My belief is that in the end, you will make these models smaller, smaller and smaller, and they will be open-sourced," Ghodsi said.

Search resuls for: "Ghodsi"

25 mentions found