OpenAI has acquired Rockset, a company that creates real-time search and data evaluation tools.
IN post on its official blog, OpenAI announced that it will integrate Rocket settechnology for “power [its] infrastructure for all products.” Rockset team members will join OpenAI, and existing Rockset customers might be migrated off the Rockset platform “gradually.”
Financial terms weren’t disclosed.
“Rockset infrastructure enables companies to transform data into actionable information,” OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said in a statement. “We are excited to deliver these benefits to our customers by integrating Rockset foundations with OpenAI products.”
Rockset, co-founded in 2016 by former Facebook engineers Venkat Venkataramani and Tudor Bosman and database architect Dhruba Borthakur, created tools that allowed corporations to routinely extract data from databases and public cloud storage services, and then index that data for Search and Analysis Applications.
Rockset’s database platform underpinned things like suggestion engines, logistics tracking dashboards, and – particularly essential for OpenAI – chatbots in domains like fintech and e-commerce.
Rocket set managed raise over $117.5 million in pre-acquisition capital from investors including Icon Ventures, Sequoia and Greylock, According to to Crunchbase data and had big-name clients including Meta and JetBlue that used Rockset as a part of a chatbot that predicted flight delays.
What exactly can OpenAI build using Rockset technology? Well, the blog post mentions enabling corporations to “better leverage their own data” and “access real-time information” when using OpenAI products. One could imagine improved tools to “base” OpenAI models on company data, perhaps to reduce hallucinations or fine-tune the model for any variety of business use cases.
Venkataramani gives a preview in post on the Rockset blog:
“Advanced search infrastructure like Rockset will make AI applications more efficient and useful,” he writes. “Rockset will become part of OpenAI and power the search infrastructure supporting the OpenAI product suite. We will help OpenAI solve the difficult database problems that AI applications face on a massive scale.”
The purchase of Rockset is a part of OpenAI’s broader recent strategy of investing significantly in its enterprise sales and technology organizations.
In May, OpenAI signed an agreement with PwC to resell OpenAI tools to other corporations. A month earlier, the company launched a business-oriented tuning and consulting program for custom models.
These moves appear to be paying off considering OpenAI’s annual revenue supposedly this 12 months, it is going to eclipse $3.4 billion. Recently OpenAI recently revealed that the enterprise-level ChatGPT, a viral AI-powered chatbot platform, has close to 600,000 users, representing 93% of all Fortune 500 corporations.
Rockset is only OpenAI’s second public acquisition after Global Illumination, a New York startup that uses artificial intelligence to build creative tools and infrastructure.