OpenAI has acquired Rockset, a database firm that provides real-time analytics, indexing and search capabilities. Rockset will help OpenAI enable its customers to better leverage their own data as they build and utilize intelligent applications. Rockset technology will be integrated into the retrieval infrastructure across OpenAI products, with members of Rockset’s San Mateo, California-based team joining the staff of OpenAI, which is headquartered in San Francisco. This is the second major purchase for OpenAI, following last year’s acquisition of New York-based AI design studio Global Illumination. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“Existing Rockset customers will experience no immediate change,” CEO Venkat Venkataramani said in a Rockset blog post, adding that the firm “will gradually transition current customers off Rockset and are committed to ensuring a smooth process.”

“OpenAI is in a tight race with rivals such as Anthropic and Alphabet Inc.’s Google to build the most capable AI models and package them with compelling services that can be sold to businesses,” writes Bloomberg.

Bloomberg says the 8-year-old Rockset “provides enterprises with a cloud-based real-time analytics database that allows developers to build data-intensive applications, like those for personalization and IT automation, at scale.”

Built on the open-source RocksDB platform created at Meta, Rockset “continuously ingests and indexes data from sources like Kafka, MongoDB, DynamoDB, and S3, enabling real-time information availability and querying,” VentureBeat reports.

Throughout 2023, Rockset focused on improving its product’s AI functionality, resulting in the ability to “run sub-second SQL queries on semi-structured data, without requiring a predefined schema,” a sort of analytical shortcut.

These vector search capabilities “provide the capability to add ‘embeddings,’ or multidimensional numerical representations of text, images and other objects for search,” explains  SiliconANGLE. “Vector embeddings make it possible for AI and machine learning algorithms to understand the contextual relationships between words or other objects, such as how ‘dogs’ and ‘cats’ are both animals, which makes conversational LLMs or recommendation engines more accurate.”

“Rockset’s infrastructure empowers companies to transform their data into actionable intelligence,” said OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap in an announcement, adding that the company will be “integrating Rockset’s foundation into OpenAI products.”