This past Monday, about a dozen engineers and executives at data science and AI company Databricks gathered in conference rooms connected via Zoom to learn if they had succeeded in building a top artificial intelligence language model. The team had spent months, and about $10 million, training DBRX, a large language model similar in design to the one behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Databricks will release DBRX under an open-source license, allowing others to build on top of its work. Across about a dozen or so benchmarks measuring the AI model’s ability to answer general knowledge questions, perform reading comprehension, solve vexing logical puzzles, and generate high-quality code, DBRX was better than every other open-source model available. It outshined Meta’s Llama 2 and Mistral’s Mixtral, two of the most popular open-source AI models available today. By open-sourcing, DBRX Databricks has joined a movement that is challenging the secretive approach of prominent companies.