- With the acquisition of Rockset, OpenAI plans to enable AI to better utilize and access real-time data, enabling OpenAI’s AI products to support more complex applications.
- Rockset claims to be “the world’s fastest search,” enabling users to develop new features 20 times faster.
OUR TAKE
While OpenAI has made acquisitions before, buying a company primarily for talent, this deal marks the first time OpenAI will integrate the technology and staff of a startup it has acquired. After the acquisition of Rockset, OpenAI will further enhance the competitiveness of its AI products and make it easier for users to achieve search.
–Zora Lin, BTW reporter
What happened
OpenAI announced that it has completed the acquisition of database search and analytics company Rockset on June 21. The company will integrate Rockset’s technology and personnel to enhance the search infrastructure for each product.
OpenAI said in the official social platform X that Rockset mainly provides data indexing and query functions, and OpenAI will integrate Rockset’s technology in the product to convert data into actionable information.
When it comes to acquiring Rockset, OpenAI says it believes in AI’s ability to change the way individuals and organizations use their data. Rockset provides a real-time analytics database, including leading data indexing and query capabilities, that will help users, developers and businesses make the most of data and get real-time information to better use AI products or build intelligent applications.
Rockset CEO and co-founder Venkat Venkataramani said that after Rockset becomes part of OpenAI, it will provide support for the search infrastructure of the OpenAI product suite, and existing Rockset customers won’t feel any changes immediately. But Rockset will gradually let existing customers out of Rockset.
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Why it’s important
Founded in 2016, Rockset is founded by former Meta employees, with a team size of about 100 people in 2020. Rockset is a real-time analytics database that automatically builds Converged Index on any data for high-performance search and analytics at scale.
With Rockset’s relatively cheap object storage, users can save money, and can achieve a relatively easy separation of storage and computing. Based on RocksDB, Rockset moved RocksDB to the cloud, providing users with a more flexible, scalable, low-cost database solution and reducing the development time of the database storage engine.
Chen Boyang, technical director of Rockset，emphasized that this is the core concept of Rockset to create products: “We believe that acceleration on the query side is to ensure that the user’s time is freed up, and don’t let the user keep adjusting the index bar. Adjusting an index is a very painful and unstable task. It can be the right index one day and the old index will be completely destroyed the next day when the data shape changes.”
AI has the opportunity to transform the way individuals and organizations use their data. OpenAI CTO Mira Murati predicted that AI systems will reach PhD-level intelligence on certain tasks within the next 1.5 years – which she alluded to could be GPT-5. Currently, systems like GPT-3 have the intelligence of a toddler, while GPT-4 has the intelligence of a smart high school student. At the same time, stricter AI regulations and ethical considerations need to be developed globally to prevent abuse.
