Databricks Asserts DBRX Raises the Bar for Open-source LLMs
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Databricks has announced the launch of DBRX, a powerful new open-source large language model that it claims sets a new bar for open models by outperforming established options like GPT-3.5 on industry benchmarks.
The company says the 132 billion parameter DBRX model surpasses popular open-source LLMs like LLaMA 2 70B, Mixtral, and Grok-1 across language understanding, programming, and maths tasks. It even outperforms Anthropic’s closed-source model Claude on certain benchmarks.
DBRX demonstrated state-of-the-art performance among open models on coding tasks, beating out specialised models like CodeLLaMA despite being a general-purpose LLM. It also matched or exceeded GPT-3.5 across nearly all benchmarks evaluated.
The state-of-the-art capabilities come thanks to a more efficient mixture-of-experts architecture that makes DBRX up to 2x faster at inference than LLaMA 2 70B, despite having fewer active parameters. Databricks claims training the model was also around 2x more compute-efficient than dense alternatives.
“DBRX is setting a new standard for open source LLMs—it gives enterprises a platform to build customised reasoning capabilities based on their own data,” said Ali Ghodsi, Databricks co-founder and CEO.
DBRX was pretrained on a massive 12 trillion tokens of “carefully curated” text and code data selected to improve quality. It leverages technologies like rotary position encodings and curriculum learning during pretraining.
Customers can interact with DBRX via APIs or use the company’s tools to finetune the model on their proprietary data. It’s already being integrated into Databricks’ AI products.
“Our research reveals that enterprises intend to allocate half of their AI budgets to generative AI,” stated Dave Menninger, Executive Director at Ventana Research, a branch of ISG. “Data security and privacy remain as one of the top trio challenges they are grappling with.
“By launching DBRX and offering an end-to-end Data Intelligence Platform, Databricks is facilitating enterprises in crafting generative AI applications that are secure, governed and custom-built to their business context, while retaining control and ownership of their intellectual property,” added Menninger.
A host of partners including Accenture, Block, Nasdaq, Prosus, Replit, and Zoom have lauded the potential of DBRX in speeding up the adoption of open, custom large language models within enterprises. Analysts believe it could instigate a shift from closed to open source as the performance of fine-tuned open models start matching proprietary ones.
Mike O’Rourke, the AI and Data Services Head at NASDAQ, remarked: “Databricks continues to be a pioneer in the industry in managing data and exploiting AI. They are a key ally to Nasdaq in creating some of our most important data systems. The release of DBRX excites us.”
The combination of strong model performance and favourable serving economics is the kind of innovation we are looking for as we grow our use of generative AI at Nasdaq.
You can find the DBRX base and fine-tuned models on
Hugging Face. The project’s
GitHub has further resources and code examples.
Photo by Ryan Quintal
See also: Large language models could ‘revolutionise the finance sector within two years’
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ai, artificial intelligence, databricks, dbrx, enterprise, large language model, llm, open source, open-source
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