Databricks’ Naveen Rao Praises Sam Altman for Making OpenAI a Product Company

Databricks VP of GenAI recently praised Sam Altman for turning OpenAI into a profitable product company.

“Contrarian view: Sam is actually doing the right things with Open AI. He has the impossible job of taking an ideologically driven research group and trying to make it into a product company. Goals aside, if he didn't do this, investment would stop,” he posted on X. 

“See, this is the issue…everyone is angry about the fact it was “open” AI. The problem is, that wasn’t going to sustain. It had to become a product company at some point to survive,” he added. 

Altman recently told some shareholders that the company is considering changing its governance structure to a for-profit business that the firm's nonprofit board doesn't control. One scenario Altman said the board is considering is a for-profit benefit corporation, which rivals such as Anthropic and xAI are using.

OpenAI has more than doubled its annualised revenue to $3.4 billion in the past six months or so, Altman has told staff, a sign that growth in the ChatGPT developer’s business is accelerating despite intensifying competition.

Databricks recently hosted its Data+ AI Summit 2024. The company announced a host of new generative AI capabilities and a major push to its open-source strategy 

The new offerings, such as Mosaic AI Model Training, Mosaic AI for RAG, and Mosaic AI Gateway, in addition to open-sourcing their Unity Catalog, aim to help enterprises build high-quality, domain-specific AI applications.

“We want to help people get the best quality possible in their domain for their GenAI application,” said CTO and co-founder Matei Zaharia in an exclusive interview with AIM. “And to do that, we see a lot of companies are building what we call compound AI systems.” 

The compound AI systems involve multiple components, such as calls to different models, retrieval of relevant data, use of external APIs and databases, and breaking problems into smaller steps. 

At the same time, Databricks is also focusing on open-source models. Last year, Databricks acquired Mosaic ML, and earlier this year, the company released its first open-source model, DBRX. “DBRX was the best model in the world for two whole weeks, and thank you, Mark Zuckerberg, for releasing that model two weeks later,” said Databricks chief Ali Ghodsi, jokingly, about the release of Llama 3.