In a conversation with a16z, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi and co-founder Ben Horowitz share pivotal stories and lessons from building Databricks. They cover Ali's transition to CEO, the strategies behind scaling an intense yet sustainable culture, the art of high-stakes dealmaking with giants like Microsoft, and the mindset required to turn down lucrative acquisition offers to build a trillion-dollar company.
Krista Opsahl-Ong from Databricks introduces Agent Bricks, a platform designed to overcome the key challenges of productionizing enterprise AI agents. The talk covers common use cases, the difficult trade-offs between cost and quality, and how Agent Bricks uses automated evaluation and advanced optimization techniques to build cost-effective, high-performance agents.
Eric Peter from Databricks outlines the evolution from the traditional MLOps lifecycle to the more complex Agent Ops lifecycle. He details the five essential components of a successful agent development platform and introduces MLflow 3.0, a new release designed to provide a comprehensive, open-standard solution for building, evaluating, and deploying AI agents.