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.
Guanhua Wang from Microsoft's DeepSpeed team explains ZeRO++, a system that tackles the communication bottleneck in large-scale LLM training. By quantizing weights and gradients, ZeRO++ reduces communication volume by 4x, leading to training speedups of over 2x, particularly in low-bandwidth and small-batch-size environments.
Asha Sharma, CVP of Product for Microsoft's AI Platform, shares insights from working with over 15,000 companies building AI. She discusses the shift from "product as artifact" to "product as organism," the rise of post-training as the new competitive moat, and how agents are transforming organizational structures from hierarchies ("org charts") into task-based networks ("work charts").