In an attempt to gain a competitive advantage over their competitors, OpenAI has acquired real-time analytics company, Rockset, to further enhance its data processing and analytic capabilities. Although financial details have yet to be disclosed, Reuters suggests that it would have been in the nine-figure range, potentially making it OpenAI’s most lucrative acquisition to date.
This deal will bolster OpenAI’s infrastructure and drastically improve performance across their products, including ChatGPT. Here’s all you need to know about this deal and how it will benefit OpenAI going forward.
What Is Rockset?
Rockset is a very powerful data analysis and index tool that can process and analyze vast amounts of data in real time. The company’s value lies behind its ability to read and comprehend data rapidly – users can search for vast amounts of data and receive a response in milliseconds.
They prioritize the protection and security of sensitive data with encryption, which is a huge dealbreaker for large-scale companies (such as OpenAI) where security is of utmost importance. Businesses also don’t have to worry about taking care of the system themselves or setting anything up – it is serverless and already fully managed. This means most teams can start using Rockset within a few minutes of signing in.
Using a hybrid search architecture, Rockset combines different search techniques, such as text search and metadata filtering into one search tool. The overall information is then fed to an AI’s RAG (retrieval augmented generation), which will give users personalized recommendations and generally improve the quality of responses.
In light of the acquisition, Rockset CEO, Venkat Venkataramani, was quick to announce that existing Rockset customers should experience no immediate change, but to prepare for a gradual transition off of their system.
How will Rockset Improve OpenAI?
OpenAI works best when it has lots of good, valuable data to work from; the better quality of information it has, the better the responses are – Rockset ensures that this is maintained efficiently and that the information being channeled is as up-to-date as possible.
As mentioned, Rockset has the capability to revolutionize RAGs, thanks to the speed at which Rockset indexes data, ensuring its responses can be both factually correct and well-detailed. Various industries that require up-to-date, minute-by-minute information (finance, healthcare, e-commerce) will benefit most from these capabilities. For example, healthcare companies can use real-time data processing to improve their patient monitoring systems by delivering personalized care plans.
Real-time data processing software is the ultimate key to success for those competing in the LLM market at the moment, with Amazon and Google having their own impressive analytic software tools (Google Cloud BigQuery and Amazon DynamoDB respectively) that, similar to Rockset, will quickly index their data.
OpenAI is looking to invest independently in their own enterprise-level LLM stack to compete with Amazon and Google, and the acquisition of Rockset is an important first step toward this. It puts them on par with their competitors in terms of indexing and analyzing their data.
It was recently announced that OpenAI will be fully integrated into Apple products, allowing all users free access to ChatGPT’s capabilities, working natively within both Siri and Apple’s systemwide Writing Tools. This deal with Rockset could not have come at a better time – OpenAI can now take their new and improved LLM system and test it on one of the most widely used technological platforms in the world.
Following the controversy surrounding OpenAI’s new voice mode sounding very similar to actress Scarlett Johansson, OpenAI has announced that they have paused this tool as they look to refine it and put it through more safety tests. With the introduction of Rockset and an upgraded RAG, OpenAI now has the platform to release an enhanced version of this tool in the future.
Summary
This acquisition looks like a statement of intent from OpenAI who have taken a huge (and expensive) step in enhancing their LLM model and positioning themselves as leaders of AI innovation.
Rockset’s capabilities will make OpenAI’s products smarter, faster, and more useful to a plethora of users with different use cases.