Artificial intelligence company Databricks has launched DBRX, an innovative, open-source large language model (LLM) that is making waves in the AI industry. According to a report by Ryan Daws on Artificial Intelligence News, DBRX sets a new standard for open-source LLMs, outperforming existing models across a variety of tasks.
The 132 billion parameter DBRX model has shown superior performance compared to popular open-source LLMs like LLaMA 2 70B, Mixtral, and Grok-1 across language understanding, programming, and maths tasks. In fact, it even topped Anthropic’s closed-source model Claude in certain benchmarks. The remarkable performance of DBRX is attributed to a more efficient mixture-of-experts architecture, making it up to 2x faster at inference than LLaMA 2 70B, despite having fewer active parameters.
According to Ali Ghodsi, Databricks co-founder and CEO, “DBRX is setting a new standard for open-source LLMs—it gives enterprises a platform to build customized reasoning capabilities based on their own data.”
DBRX was pretrained on a massive 12 trillion tokens of text and code data, which were selected carefully to enhance quality. The model utilizes technologies like rotary position encodings and curriculum learning during pretraining. Databricks claims that training DBRX was approximately 2x more compute-efficient than dense alternatives.
Clients can engage with DBRX through APIs or utilize Databricks’ tools to fine-tune the model on their proprietary data. The model is already being integrated into Databricks’ AI products.
According to Dave Menninger, Executive Director at Ventana Research, part of ISG, enterprises plan to spend half of their AI budgets on generative AI. One of the top challenges they encounter is data security and privacy. “With their end-to-end Data Intelligence Platform and the introduction of DBRX, Databricks is enabling enterprises to build generative AI applications that are governed, secure and tailored to the context of their business, while maintaining control and ownership of their IP along the way.”
Industry partners including Accenture, Block, Nasdaq, Prosus, Replit, and Zoom have commended the potential of DBRX to propel enterprise adoption of open, customized large language models. Analysts believe that it could trigger a shift from closed to open-source as fine-tuned open models match proprietary performance.
Mike O’Rourke, Head of AI and Data Services at NASDAQ, commented, “They [Databricks] continue to be at the forefront of the industry in managing data and leveraging AI, and we are excited about the release of DBRX. The combination of strong model performance and favourable serving economics is the kind of innovation we are looking for as we grow our use of generative AI at Nasdaq.”
To explore DBRX, you can find the base and fine-tuned models on Hugging Face. The project’s GitHub has additional resources and code examples.
As an AI consultancy firm, AI First Agency aids companies in navigating the rapidly evolving technological landscape. We can help your organization leverage powerful AI tools like DBRX to ensure your business thrives in this era of digital transformation.
