DATABRICKS CEO ALI GHODSI: A Costly AI Training Foray, Sidestepping the Model Wars & the Push to Kill Tokenmaxxing Bloat

Databricks releases products to compete with ClickHouse, Splunk & Oracle

Back in 2024, when Databricks released its open-source DBRX model, the data warehousing company bragged that it had spent $10 million on the training run that made that model possible.

Last week, in an expansive interview ahead of the release of a suite of new Databricks AI products, the company’s boisterous CEO, Ali Ghodsi, came clean: Databricks had actually spent about $20 million on the cluster to train the model. Only $4 million went to the training run that actually produced DBRX. The remaining roughly $16 million went to stumbling through the wilderness, downtime, and other mistakes of inexperience. They’d either underestimated or overestimated the cost depending on how you slice it.

The waste felt unavoidable.

“First of all the cluster is not running all the time — it’s idle,” Ghodsi told me. “You don’t just yolo and say hey let’s run the thing and then it comes out and it’s like after a month of training it’s like oh it was shit. So you do smaller training runs — so you work your way up to it.”