OpenAI Acquires Rockset

Very 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.

OpenAI 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.