Databricks marks its presence in the Philippines with its inaugural Data Intelligence Day

Showcases its Data Intelligence Platform and its most recent launch, DBRX, an open, general-purpose LLM that outperformed all established open source models on standard benchmarks at the time of its launch

Databricks, the Data and AI company, hosted its inaugural Data Intelligence Day in the Philippines today and gathered data and AI experts across the country to connect, share best practices, and get a first look at the company’s latest product innovations. This includes the recent launch of DBRX, an open, general-purpose large language model (LLM) that outperformed all established open source models on standard benchmarks at the time of its launch.

DBRX – a new standard for efficient open source model

Built entirely on Databricks, DBRX democratizes the training and tuning of custom, high-performing LLMs for every enterprise so they no longer need to rely on a small handful of closed models. 

“At Databricks, our vision has always been to democratize data and AI. We’re doing that by delivering data intelligence to every enterprise — helping them understand and use their private data to build their own AI systems. DBRX is the result of that aim,” said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO at Databricks. “We’re excited about DBRX for three key reasons: first, it beat open source models on state-of-the-art industry benchmarks at the time of its launch. Second, it beats GPT-3.5 on most benchmarks, which should accelerate the trend we’re seeing across our customer base as organizations replace proprietary models with open source models. Finally, DBRX uses a mixture-of-experts architecture, making the model extremely fast in terms of tokens per second, as well as being cost effective to serve. All in all, DBRX is setting a new standard for open source LLMs — it gives enterprises a platform to build customized reasoning capabilities based on their own data.”

Data Intelligence Day kicks off in the Philippines

The Manila Data Intelligence Day is part of a global tour with stops in more than 30 cities, with speakers from Aboitiz Data Innovation, Databricks, Maya, and PLDT. 

“The Philippines is one of our key markets in the ASEAN region and we’re thrilled to be seeing enterprise AI adoption gaining traction across various sectors. Today’s event is the first of our many future events in the country and we’re excited to be gathering so many local data and AI practitioners today to connect and learn from each other. We look forward to helping more Filipino customers use AI securely, with their own data, on our Data Intelligence Platform,” said Cecily Ng, Vice President and General Manager for Databricks in ASEAN.

Data-forward companies are leveraging the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to optimize business operations, drive innovation through predictive analytics and AI applications, and enhance decision-making. Built on a lakehouse architecture, the Databricks platform provides an open, unified foundation for all data and governance and is powered by a data intelligence engine that understands the uniqueness of each enterprise’s data.

“We have adopted the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform as our centralized data platform, integrating it with our diverse sources of data from different systems. Combined with our leading data management practices, this creates a world-class data architecture that generates meaningful insights and powers hyper-personalized experiences for our customers. As a pioneering fintech company in the country, our investment in AI spans various domains, including machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and emerging areas such as generative AI. We are committed to staying at the forefront of technological innovation to enhance our products and better serve our customers.” said Alfred Lo, Group CTO at Maya.

“Aboitiz Data Innovation (ADI) is accelerating AboitizPower’s data science and AI capabilities to bolster power plants’ reliability and ensure a safe and resilient power grid, providing reliable and ample power supply to their users. With the Databricks Intelligence Platform, we are able to use data and AI to do predictive maintenance as well as demand and supply forecasting to better meet the needs of Aboitiz customers. We are excited to share our learnings and best practices at the Data Intelligence Day in Manila today,” said Dr. David R. Hardoon, CEO of Aboitiz Data Innovation.

Globally, Databricks reached over US$1.6 billion in revenue for its fiscal year ending January 31, representing over 50% year-on-year growth, driven by rapid product innovation. 

The Data Intelligence Day event recording is available to view on-demand at this registration link. Access the event photos here.

(The article was originally published on Manila Standard.)