OpenAI has made an exciting acquisition, bringing Rockset into its fold. Rockset, a company founded by ex-Facebook engineers and a database architect, specializes in creating tools for real-time search and data analytics. With this acquisition, OpenAI aims to integrate Rockset’s technology into its infrastructure and products.
Rockset’s database platform has been used in various applications, including recommendation engines, logistics-tracking dashboards, and chatbots in the fintech and e-commerce domains. Their tools enable companies to ingest data from databases and cloud storage services and index it for search and analytics purposes. Notable customers, such as Meta and JetBlue, have leveraged Rockset’s capabilities for their own operations.
By incorporating Rockset’s technology, OpenAI envisions enabling companies to better leverage their own data and access real-time information when using OpenAI products. This integration could result in improved tooling that grounds OpenAI’s models on a company’s data, reducing issues like hallucinations and allowing for fine-tuning the models for specific business use cases.
Venkat Venkataramani, one of Rockset’s co-founders, explains that advanced retrieval infrastructure like Rockset will enhance the power and usefulness of AI applications. Rockset will become an integral part of OpenAI, providing the retrieval infrastructure for OpenAI’s product suite. This partnership will address the challenging database problems that AI apps encounter at a massive scale.
The acquisition of Rockset aligns with OpenAI’s recent strategy of investing in enterprise sales and technology organizations. This strategy has proven successful, with OpenAI expected to generate over $3.4 billion in annual revenue this year. Additionally, OpenAI’s business-oriented custom model tuning and consulting program has gained traction, attracting close to 600,000 users, including 93% of Fortune 500 companies.
Rockset marks OpenAI’s second public acquisition, following Global Illumination, a New York-based startup focused on AI-powered creative tools and infrastructure. These acquisitions demonstrate OpenAI’s commitment to expanding its capabilities and offerings to meet the evolving needs of businesses.