The Artificial Intelligence (AI) landscape, particularly in the realm of large language models (LLMs), is taking yet another leap forward as tech giant Databricks introduces DBRX. This new open-source LLM promises to set new standards in AI industry benchmarks, outperforming established options like GPT-3.5.
Databricks, a leading data and AI company, recently announced the launch of DBRX, a powerful open-source LLM. This model, equipped with 132 billion parameters, surpasses popular open-source LLMs like LLaMA 2 70B, Mixtral, and Grok-1 in language understanding, programming, and maths tasks. It even outperforms Anthropic’s closed-source model Claude on certain benchmarks. The news of DBRX’s launch was first reported by Ryan Daws on Artificial Intelligence News.
The strength of DBRX lies in its efficient mixture-of-experts architecture that makes it up to 2x faster at inference than LLaMA 2 70B, despite having fewer active parameters. Databricks further claims that training the model was also around 2x more compute-efficient than dense alternatives.
“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,” said Ali Ghodsi, Databricks co-founder and CEO.
The DBRX model was pretrained on a massive 12 trillion tokens of “carefully curated” text and code data selected to improve quality. It leverages technologies like rotary position encodings and curriculum learning during pretraining.
Customers can interact with DBRX via APIs or use Databricks’ tools to fine-tune the model on their proprietary data. The model is already being integrated into Databricks’ AI products, indicating its readiness for practical application.
Dave Menninger, Executive Director at Ventana Research, part of ISG, shed light on the significance of this launch by stating, “Our research shows enterprises plan to spend half of their AI budgets on generative AI. One of the top three challenges they face 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.”
DBRX’s potential to accelerate enterprise adoption of open, customized large language models has garnered praise from partners including Accenture, Block, Nasdaq, Prosus, Replit, and Zoom. Analysts predict that DBRX could drive 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, said, “Databricks is a key partner to Nasdaq on some of our most important data systems. They 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 favorable serving economics is the kind of innovation we are looking for as we grow our use of generative AI at Nasdaq.”
For those keen to explore DBRX, base and fine-tuned models are available on Hugging Face, with further resources and code examples provided on the project’s GitHub.
As AI continues to evolve at a rapid pace, AI First Agency is committed to providing AI consultancy, tools, and marketing services to help businesses navigate this rapidly evolving technological landscape. The launch of DBRX by Databricks is a testimony to the growing capabilities of AI and the potential it holds to revolutionize various industries.
