OpenAI has acquired a company, Rocket, building tools to run real-time search and data analytics.
In a post on its official blog, OpenAI said it would integrate Rockset's technology “powerfully.” [its] infrastructure across all products.” Rockset team members will join OpenAI, and existing Rockset customers will be “gradually” migrated off Rockset's platform.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
“Rocket's infrastructure empowers companies to turn their data into actionable intelligence,” OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said in a statement. “We are excited to bring these benefits to our customers by integrating RockSet's foundation into OpenAI products.”
Rockset, founded in 2016 by former Facebook engineers Venkat Venkataramani and Tudor Boseman and database architect Dhruba Borthakar, created tools that allow companies to automatically ingest data from databases and public cloud storage services. and can then index that data for search and analytics. Application
Rockset's database platform has underpinned things like recommendation engines, logistics tracking dashboards and — especially relevant to OpenAI — chatbots in domains like fintech and e-commerce.
According to data from Crunchbase, Rocket managed to raise more than $117.5 million in capital from investors including Icon Ventures, Sequoia and Greylock before the acquisition, and had customers of its namesake brand, including Meta and JetBlue. used rockets as a component of their flight delay predictions. Chatbot
So what exactly can OpenAI build with Rocksat's tech? Well, the blog post mentions allowing companies to “better leverage their data” and “access real-time information” as they use OpenAI products. One can imagine better tooling to “ground” OpenAI's models on company data, perhaps toward reducing artifacts or fine-tuning the model for many business use cases.
Venkataramani gave a preview in a post on Rockset's blog:
“An advanced retrieval infrastructure like Rocset will make AI apps more powerful and useful,” he writes. “Rockset will become part of OpenAI and power the retrieval infrastructure supporting OpenAI's product suite. We will help OpenAI solve the difficult database problems that AI apps face at scale.” have to do it.”
The Rockset buy fits into OpenAI's broader recent strategy of investing heavily in its enterprise sales and tech organization.
In May, OpenAI signed an agreement with PwC to resell OpenAI's tools to other businesses. A month ago, the company launched a business-oriented custom model tuning and consulting program.
These moves seem to be paying dividends, with OpenAI's annual revenue reportedly set to eclipse $3.4 billion this year. Recently, OpenAI recently revealed that its viral AI-powered chatbot platform, ChatGPT, has nearly 600,000 enterprise-grade users, including 93% of all Fortune 500 companies.
Rockset is OpenAI's second public acquisition after Global Illumination, a New York-based startup that taps AI to build creative tools and infrastructure.