AI Startup, Backed By Nancy Pelosi's $5M Investment, Unveils New Open-Source Model That Allegedly Outperforms Meta's Llama 2 And Elon Musk's Grok

Private AI startup Databricks released a new large language model (LLM) on Wednesday that is said to outperform Meta Platforms Inc.'s Llama 2 and Elon Musk's Grok.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) recently disclosed that she and her husband, Paul Pelosi, invested $5 million in Databricks.

What Happened: "DBRX" is the first general-purpose LLM from Databricks and the company claims that its structure helps it remain fast and customizable.

Databricks says that its DBRX model beats other open-source models like Meta's Llama 2, xAI's Grok-1, and Mistral's Mixtral.

"This shows that open-source models are continuing to improve in quality, a trend that we are proud to play our part in."

Apart from this, Databricks also claims to beat OpenAI's GPT 3.5 on "most" benchmarks. OpenAI released GPT 3.5 in November 2022.

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Databricks says its DBRX model has 136 billion parameters – nearly twice that of Meta's Llama 2 at 70 billion, but smaller than Grok which has 314 billion parameters.

However, the company says it activates about 36 billion parameters on average for a typical query, which helps in improving its hardware utilization, speed, and performance.

A parameter in an LLM refers to a variable that the model uses during its training process.

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Why It Matters: Pelosi's $5 million investment in Databricks brings her into the company of several high-profile investors like Ark Invest's Cathie Wood, Andreessen Horowitz, and Ontario Teacher's Pension Plan, among others.

The AI startup, founded in 2013, has raised over $4 billion so far, with the latest valuation pegged at $43 billion. For comparison, OpenAI's latest valuation is pegged at $80 billion.

Databricks is primarily targeting enterprise users with its new LLM, allowing them to build custom models on top of DBRX. The San Francisco-based company counts NASDAQ, JetBlue, Block, and Accenture as some of its customers and partners.

Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang is also an investor in Databricks, and he thinks enterprise data is a "goldmine" for generative AI.

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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of Benzinga Neuro and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.

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