US company co-founded by two Romanians tackles AI with open-source model

The company Databricks, founded by a group of professors from the University of California, Berkeley, that includes two computer scientists of Romanian origin, Ion Stoica and Matei Zaharia, recently entered the artificial intelligence field with the launch of the DBRX model.

The model, which was trained after a USD 10 million investment and 8 months of development, is available open source on platforms such as GitHub and Hugging Face, according to Startupcafe.ro.

The model comes in two versions: DBRX Base and DBRX Instruct. They can use a wide range of data, from public to customized or personal, and can be applied in various fields. Compared to other open source models like LlaMa-2 from Meta, Mistral AI, or Grok from xAI, DBRX promises superior performance, including in comparison with ChatGPT-3.5.

According to a company press release, DBRX enables organizations around the world to cost-effectively build, train, and serve their own custom LLMs.

Nevertheless, the Databricks model does not fully compare with GPT-4 due to the lack of a multimodal approach. The company also noted that its users' data were not used for training this AI model, therefore addressing potential concerns regarding data privacy and security.

Two of Databricks’ seven founders, Ion Stoica and Matei Zaharia, have strong connections to Romania, not only the US. The first has an academic background in both countries, while the latter is known for inventing the open-source unified analytics engine Apache Spark.

Founded in 2013, Databricks is one of the biggest providers of tools for large-scale data analysis, according to Bloomberg. It currently has a market value of USD 43 billion and is labeled as a “decacorn,” meaning a privately held company with a value of over USD 10 billion, highlighting its growth potential.

(Photo source: Timon Schneider | Dreamstime.com)