Cloudera is acquiring Verta, a tool developer that accelerates AI application building and LLM training.
Cloudera says it wants to serve its customers with the latest technologies. Right now, most of the new developments are in the AI market. Therefore, according to Cloudera CEO Charles Sansbury, the acquisition makes perfect sense: “We are moving quickly to provide our customers with the technologies they need to drive their data and AI initiatives, and we have no plans to slow down. This is the first of several strategic moves we expect to make as we extend our leadership in data and trusted enterprise AI.”
Pre-packaged AI models
In Verta’s offering, software developers will find pre-packaged AI models, datasets and examples of possible prompts. With the offering, developers quickly start by already getting a foundation.
The tools further simplify RAG training techniques. Retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG for short, is a technique to further train an LLM without retraining the existing foundation. RAG inherently adds additional complexity, but Verta’s tools would greatly simplify the work and reduce it to a task of a few minutes.
Also read: What is Retrieval-Augmented Generation?
Expanding software bundles Cloudera
The tools seem to be a perfect match with Cloudera’s Accelerators for ML Projects (AMPs). These are also software bundles for developing LLMs. Verta’s tools will be integrated into Cloudera’s data platform.
Internally, Verta’s team will be added to the ML group of the data analytics software company. It is not known for what amount the acquisition was completed.