Data Bricks just announcing it's closed one of the largest venture funding rounds in history.

$10 billion in equity and over $5 billion in debt and securing meta as a rare strategic investor.

The startup has been a key part of big tech's adoption of AI doing the cleaning, the analyzing,

and organizing of the important data used to train models.

For today's tech check,

Deirdreboza brings us an exclusive interview with CEO Ali Godzi. Dee? Leslie, thank you so much and Ali. Thank you again for making the time to talk to us this morning. A big round. Let's talk

about this meta investment though, because it really underscores data bricks alignment with open source AI. And given the adoption of Lama and other breakthroughs

that we've seen from the likes of Deep Seek, a Chinese lab, do you think that the era of proprietary

closed source AI is over? What does that mean for the likes of an open AI?

No, I think that there's going to be both, but we're definitely seeing an explosion of open source models. But the thing that really changed the market was when meta released Lama. That just

completely changed the landscape. And we immediately saw thousands of customers immediately

starting to use the Lama open source models. And one of the main reasons is that when they're open source, you can actually take these

models and modify them and customize them on your enterprise custom use cases.

So that's what everybody was doing.

And the surprising thing for us, they were especially using the smaller models, you know,

the 8 billion parameters, as they're called the tiny ones.

So we started partnering closely with them then to give the feedback of how these enterprises were using it.

And that's where the partnership started.

And it made sense to just deepen it with an investment here.

Right. And, Allie, you're a big player in this space, and you're sort of going all in on open source.

So what does that mean for the industry? What does that mean for sort of the investment

proposition for the likes of open AI and the big AI startups and companies that are developing

...