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OpenAI Acquires Rockset
- softwaredoug 2y agoIs this a death knell to many of the vector DBs pushing RAG solutions right now? (Or maybe it’s validation in RAG and these companies should rejoice)
- nextworddev 2y agoYour workload is my opportunity - OpenAI, probably
- posix_monad 2y agoNah, that was Postgres vector extensions
- PeterCorless 2y ago"RAG" is more of a concept than a specification. So the Cambrian explosion of how to actually do it will continue unabated. Likewise, I don't think it's going to stem the tide of adding vector indexes and similarity search techniques to traditional databases. Instead, if anything, I think this is a validation that traditional databases aren't going anywhere — OLAP or OLTP. Behind all the LLM models you're still going to need true, authoritative data in databases to avoid (or at least minimize) the hallucination problem. AI needs, if anything, even more programmatic ways to get at that data.
- codezero 2y agoReally surprised to hear that they will be shutting down the SaaS business and all existing customers will need to offboard by the end of September. Quite a few of my customers build on top of Rockset and it won’t be a smooth transition.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y agoClassic VC funded saas. Why people would build actual businesses on top of these fly at night Saas companies funded by VC money is beyond me.
- codezero 2y agoIt's not really classic. There are many different kinds of exits, this one is pretty uncommon in my experience, especially for a company that's been around as long as it has and with the customers they have.
- hodgesrm 2y agoFor another very similar example see FoundationDB, which was acquired and shuttered by Apple: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9259986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9259986 More happily FoundationDB was later released as open source and is successfully used by many companies beyond Apple. Snowflake is a prominent example. [0] [0] https://www.snowflake.com/blog/how-foundationdb-powers-snowflake-metadata-forward https://www.snowflake.com/blog/how-foundationdb-powers-snowf...
- codezero 2y agoyes, this does happen, but when someone says "classic" it kind of implies "common" - this isn't a common outcome. I am directly affected by this one, so, trust me, I know, it sucks.
- rockyroad 2y agohttps://docs.rockset.com/documentation/docs/faq https://docs.rockset.com/documentation/docs/faq Rockset is off boarding existing customers. Definitely sucks we spent the last 3 months adopting it. We used it to replicate dynamodb in near real time for adhoc & reporting queries. Schemaless architecture was very easy to work with
- noufalibrahim 2y agoIdeally, success of customers should mean success of company but the incentives are wildly misaligned here. It seems perfectly "okay" from the company perspective since they are in it to make money but doing that by telling their customers to "leave because we got acquired and no longer care about what we sold you last week" is really harsh.
- Maxatar 2y agoIf you're a corporate customer, then you take that risk when you sign up for a month to month contract. Now usually a month to month works very well for you, but it is a risk you accept. A lot of corporate customers will seek longer term contracts, a year or even longer, so they can lock in a price and various service guarantees. Even in the case of this acquisition it's only customers on a month to month plan that have to migrate by September, customers on a long term contract will continue to have access and support for the duration of their contract.
- neilv 2y ago> [flagged] [dead] OpenAI Acquires Rockset (openai.com) I vouched for this because it seems relevant, and I saw no reason in the comments to flag it.
- ram_rar 2y ago> How long will service remain available? > Month-to-month customers without an active contract will have until Monday, > September 30th, 2024, 5 PM PDT to off-board. I'd love to hear from someone with expertise in vendor onboarding and business continuity risk: how do vendor contracts typically protect customers in situations like this? I'm sure will be super frustrated with datastore vendor change, which would need nontrivial resources from product development to system migration in such a short span of time.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> how do vendor contracts typically protect customers in situations like this? That's in the termination clause.
- borski 2y agoThere is typically a change of control clause too.
- hluska 2y agoVendor contracts typically have both termination and change of control clauses. In general, you can negotiate for more security, but you will pay heavily for it. The typical contract though contains very little in the way of customer protection. Technically, when companies choose a vendor, they should consider risks like a company suddenly being acquired. In practice, it’s quite hard to assign an actual number to that column - it’s almost always a risk but it’s extremely hard to quantify. You’ll often hear things like “every vendor could be acquired so that counts equally for all choices” when that risk gets discussed.
- hodgesrm 2y ago> I'd love to hear from someone with expertise in vendor onboarding and business continuity risk: how do vendor contracts typically protect customers in situations like this? The short answer: they generally don't, unless you negotiate for it. I run a company and dealing with this kind of situation (or better still anticipating it) is part of my job. The Rockset situation generally falls under "termination for convenience" where a party of the contract terminates for reasons other than cause, e.g., bankruptcy or the other party violating contract terms. Taking the Rockset TOS as an instructive example, it covers customer's termination for convenience in Section 15.2. [0] However, there's nothing about Rockset terminating for convenience. Normally this ambiguity could cause legal problems for the vendor, but Rockset added a 'get out of jail free card' in Section 2. They can just change the ToS. > 2. Changes to Agreement or Services. Rockset may update this Agreement at any time, in its sole discretion. If Rockset does so, it will let Customer know either by posting the updated Agreement on the Site or through other communications. If Customer continues to use the Services after Rockset has posted updated Agreement, Customer agrees to be bound by the updated Agreement. Because the Services are evolving over time, Rockset may change or discontinue all or any part of the Services, at any time and without notice, at its sole discretion. I am not a lawyer but (a) this is an awful contract for customers and (b) all is not lost. Your best recourse is to check with a lawyer to see if what footholds you can use (probably few), then make a public stink about destroying your data. I sincerely doubt the new owners will want to deal with that and will extend support. The next time around, get a lawyer to help and negotiate terms. Pro tip: Smaller vendors are often more flexible, but all of them negotiate if they want the deal badly enough. [0] https://rockset.com/legal/terms-of-service/ https://rockset.com/legal/terms-of-service/
- pr337h4m 2y agoLooks like we'll finally be able to search our past ChatGPT convos without having to Ctrl-F the data export
- ot 2y agoVery unexpected acquisition. I don't think that Rockset is a suitable infrastructure for RAG, a purpose-built inverted index would be far more efficient (both in terms of compute and storage), so I'm not sure how much of the technology would actually be useful for them. I can think of two options - Pure acqui-hire: virtually all of Rockset engineering leadership is ex-Meta, and OpenAI has been hiring several senior infra engineers from Meta, so these are all people that have worked together previously. - OpenAI is building some product where customers can ingest large amounts of data, which could be managed by the Rockset infrastructure as source of truth, and then indexed by their RAG systems.
- hipadev23 2y agoOpenAI has billions of dollars and nothing but GPUs to spend it on. This isn’t strategic per-se, it’s just rollup. Good place to be in for any data-adjacent product company. Google and Amazon followed the same strategy for over a decade just buying anything that was possibly helpful.
- tudorb 2y agoGiuseppe! Long time no see. Rockset’s architecture changed somewhat since we last talked— not in fundamental ways, but in ways that would alleviate your concerns. If you want to talk (not secret) technical details, you know where to find me :) -Tudor.
- ot 2y ago
- netvarun 2y agoCongrats to the team. IIRC their CTO was the creator of RocksDB.
- tylerhannan 2y agoA database is core to your infrastructure...finding out your database is going away is a horrifying situation. Finding out that the time you have to migrate is a few months. Agh. As others will say, there are options. Rockset helpfully posts links to a bunch of comparisons on their website, and these alternatives include ClickHouse, Elasticsearch, Druid, etc.. https://rockset.com/real-time-analytics-comparison/ https://rockset.com/real-time-analytics-comparison/ I'm inherently biased (as a member of the ClickHouse team). But do check ClickHouse out. You can always come hang out in our Slack (clickhouse.com/slack) and, of course, the combination of hosted ClickHouse (clickhouse.com/cloud) and the open-source (github.com/clickhouse) may add a bit of comfort when your vendor up and disappears via acquisition.
- lolinder 2y agoTo anyone else who may be confused like I was: Rockset will, in fact, "gradually transition current customers off Rockset". The OpenAI announcement linked above doesn't say so, but the Rockset announcement does: https://rockset.com/blog/openai-acquires-rockset/ https://rockset.com/blog/openai-acquires-rockset/ Month-to-month users been given until September 30, which is a very short amount of time for a major infrastructure transition. Enterprise users are given a vague "talk to your account manager" answer: https://docs.rockset.com/documentation/docs/faq https://docs.rockset.com/documentation/docs/faq In other words, the above isn't just FUD from a competitor, there legitimately are going to be a lot of frantic refugees in the coming months.
- fullspectrumdev 2y agoI’ve no skin in this particular game that I know of but this migration period is really, really short.
- deanc 2y agoEspecially if you’re in certain parts of Northern Europe where it’s common to take the whole of July off work.
- fullspectrumdev 2y agoJesus having read the releases this comment should go up more given that I suspect a lot of shops will not have enough time to migrate.
- zX41ZdbW 2y agoI have tested Rockset for competitive analysis. Good parts: It has a slick and nice-looking UI. Good documentation. Many data loading options (including S3). SQL support is good (Calcite?). Types are inferred on data loading. But you have to choose one "timestamp" column. Bad parts: First data load attempts failed (after 24 hours, it showed something like "too many retries"). I've loaded around 500 million rows, and the storage limit ran out. Query performance did not shine. Storage size was very large (it seems they create many indices automatically). Considerations: The technology is not open-source. It is rocksdb + secondary indices + object storage + SQL engine.
- refset 2y ago> The technology is not open-source Not entirely fair - see https://github.com/rockset/rocksdb-cloud https://github.com/rockset/rocksdb-cloud (a fork of RocksDB with a separation of storage and compute, using S3 and Lambda-based compaction)
- xyst 2y agoI wonder how much money OpenAI dangled in front of Rockset C-level execs and board to agree to acquisition. Seems company was founded in 2016 (8 years ago) [1] With investment from vulture capitalists to the tune of $117M. [2] I would assume they want a sizeable return on investment, so maybe a $250-350M cash deal? Doesn’t seem like this would be a unicorn, but it’s a payoff. Certainly will cover the losses from a few bad investments. [1] https://venturebeat.com/ai/openai-acquires-rockset-to-strengthen-its-retrieval-capabilities/ https://venturebeat.com/ai/openai-acquires-rockset-to-streng... [2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/rockset/company_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/rockset/company_fina...
- m3kw9 2y agoA lot of stock
- freedomben 2y agoAI is a difficult space to be a customer in. All customers/investors/etc want you to add "AI" to your products, but for the majority of people that means using a vendor, and the churn in the space is shocking. It's this point where my gratitude for Llama and Meta is extremely high.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bbor 2y agoCan we all agree that OpenAI should be banned from any kinds of corporate acquisitions? Ditto for Microsoft/Google/Meta, obviously
- davedx 2y agoNo, why on earth?
- noobcoder 2y agoWhy so? At the end of the day its all business and talking about ethics That way most of the productivity or developer SaaS acquisitions would not happen since they are done by FANG only
- noobcoder 2y agoWhy so? At the end of the day its all business and talking about ethics That way most of the productivity or developer SaaS acquisitions would not happen since they are done by FANG only
- Merick 2y agoI'll always remember Rockset for their ridiculous comparison page: https://rockset.com/real-time-analytics-comparison/ https://rockset.com/real-time-analytics-comparison/ Maybe they should rename it to their migration options page. Or maybe I'll just ask ChatGPT what the best alternative is... Still, pretty useful stuff, but it also feels like Rockset had been moving a little too slowly in recent years, but congrats to them on finding a new home.
- idrathernot 2y agoNot a good look for OpenAI. Shows a lack of confidence in their internal prospects to push the needle if they’re already considering inorganic growth alternatives.
- asdsyd 2y agoJust trying out my first comment on hacker news in a move to doing away from X. Please ignore this. Thanks
- xeromal 2y agoHello!
- Ylpertnodi 2y agoWhat, in particular, are you getting away from. And why hn (or have you been lurking)?
- wantsanagent 2y agoOpenAI Eng Mgmt: "Hey, we really like this rockset thing we've been using, but we don't have the people to build it out as fast as you want." OpenAI Leadership: "Ok, buy Rockset and have them build anything you need." OpenAI Eng Mgmt: "... Ok. You want to run a db service?" OpenAI Leadership: "No. Dump all the existing customers. They build for us now."
- jstummbillig 2y agoYes, that's how acqui-hiring goes. Idk. Anything is noteworthy when OpenAI does it, I suppose?
- Jensson 2y agoIt is surprising every time you see a non-profit behave exactly like a for-profit. You'd think there would be some difference, but no apparently we see there is basically none. At least I have never seen a non-profit acquihire before.
- codezero 2y agoOpenAI isn’t a nonprofit. https://openai.com/our-structure/ https://openai.com/our-structure/
- hodgesrm 2y agoThat and the fact that Rockset has been around for a while and has accumulated a decent number of users who are now in search of alternatives.
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoSeems a bit of an odd fit for OpenAI. But I assume they had good reasons.
- fire_lake 2y agoThey couldn’t get GPT5 to write a clone for them?
- alclol 2y agoAs others have mentioned, this acquisition leaves many Rockset customers in a tough spot with a short timeline to migrate. I'd like to bring attention to a potential alternative: RisingWave(https://risingwave.com/ https://risingwave.com/). RisingWave is an open-source streaming database designed for real-time analytics and data processing. Like Rockset, it offers PostgreSQL compatibility and impressive ability to handle both streaming and batch data. What sets RisingWave apart is its focus on stream processing while maintaining SQL compatibility. This could be particularly valuable for users leveraging Rockset's real-time capabilities. RisingWave offers several features that may appeal to Rockset users. It's built to scale in cloud environments and can ingest data from a large variety of sources. The database supports materialized views for efficient query processing and ensures data consistency with ACID transactions. For those concerned about vendor lock-in after this experience, RisingWave's open-source nature (Apache 2.0 license) provides an extra layer of assurance. There's also a managed cloud offering for those who prefer a hands-off approach. I encourage impacted Rockset users to explore RisingWave as part of their evaluation process. The project has a welcoming community(join at risingwave.com/slack) and extensive documentation to help with the transition. [Disclosure: I'm associated with RisingWave. Happy to answer any questions or provide more details about how it compares to Rockset for specific use cases.]
- bayouborne 2y agoIt's clear OpenAI badly wants to get to a place where the Support and R&D departments of big companies can dump every disjointed scrap of info they've been collecting for years, into a massive bucket, let OpenAI's servers cook it for a while and then like magic, let managers ask the Borgian result.. stuff. Why is this process failing? What's not relevant? What stuff that we've demoted in importance, isn't? etc etc etc
- threeseed 2y agoThis is exactly it here. It’s been very common to see startups many of whom have never set foot in an enterprise push this idea that you can drop a LLM on top of company data and ask questions like it was ChatGPT. The reality is that most company data is a mess with little funding/will to fix it and so the results are unusable. So if OpenAI wants to be anything other more than a chatbot they will need to start to tackle this problem. Amazing to watch their aspirations go from such lofty heights to being just another enterprise data infrastructure SaaS company. And should be a clear sign that the AI hype train has run out of stream.
- acossta 2y agoQ3 just got derailed for all Rockset customers. These migrations are going to be complicated as there is no 1-1 drop-in replacement. They will touch every aspect of the data lifecycle, from ingestion and transformation to serving. Query optimization will also have to be redone/rethought. At Propel, we just announced our Rockset migration service to help customers through this process: https://www.propeldata.com/blog/rockset-migration-service https://www.propeldata.com/blog/rockset-migration-service
- Boltgolt 2y agoAt what point is a comment just an ad?
- m1william 2y agoI want to add my sympathies for those looking at migration in the near future. At least there are tons of good projects out there these days! If it is helpful to anyone our company provides a data platform designed for high speed analytics at scale. It's certainly not a 1:1 alternative, but if you are looking for an all-in-one solution with a lot fewer moving parts we might be the right answer. We're happy to provide an extended free trial through September 30 for anyone looking at migration alternatives: https://docs.minusonedb.com/#start-your-free-trial https://docs.minusonedb.com/#start-your-free-trial In any case we wish everyone an easy transition to your next solution!
- alberto6996 2y ago[flagged]
- alberto6996 2y agoYes this is true. I had same experience at a period when I had no option than to go hire a hacker online to get it fixed in 2 days. Good enough i met a professional that got the job well done. These hackers are best with quality services. Spyrecovery36 ( gm ail ) co m . I have been using them and recommended to friends as well.
- jfrostpierce 2y ago[dead]
- srhyne 2y agoRockset users scrambling to find a new real-time analytics home.... I'm putting together a public/free Rockset feature comparison matrix. I want to help educate customers (and other vendors) on what Rockset did so well and what considerations are needed to find a replacement. https://bit.ly/rockset-feature-comparison https://bit.ly/rockset-feature-comparison HN'ers I realize you are wizards, don't shoot the messenger. Just trying to help.
- geragray 2y agoGreat initiative making a list of possible Rockset replacements. Would it be possible to open the Notion page for guest contributions? I would like to add CrateDB (I work there) to the list. CrateDB is a distributed SQL database purposely built for real-time analytics across large datasets of structured and semi-structured data. Similarly to Rockset, it indexes all data in real-time (text, vector, geospatial, time-series, and JSON) for the most efficient search and fast ad hoc query execution at any scale. It is built on top of Apache Lucene and unlike Rockset is open-source (https://github.com/crate/crate https://github.com/crate/crate). Rocket frequently comes up among other solutions our users were looking at before choosing CrateDB. For example https://cratedb.com/customers/govspend https://cratedb.com/customers/govspend.
- srhyne 2y agoYes, Sergey, you are now and editor. Thank you for contributing. I’m going to dig into CrateDB soon.