Datanami AI

In Gartner's 2025 Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine Learning (DSML) platforms, Databricks ranks first, surpassing last year's co-leaders Microsoft and Google. The report evaluates 16 vendors and highlights the shift towards generative AI and agentic AI, with foundation models playing a central role.

Since ChatGPT's launch in late 2022, generative AI has sparked massive interest and hype. Organizations are racing to adopt GenAI, but there's a gap between desire and readiness. A recent IDC survey shows nearly 80% of executives are confident their companies will use GenAI, yet only 30% are well prepared. The article explores build vs. buy decisions, use cases (productivity, business functions, industry-specific), and key prerequisites like governance, privacy, and data architecture.

The digital skills gap persists, with AI/ML shortages particularly acute. A SAS survey found 63% of decision-makers cite AI/ML as the biggest skills gap. O'Reilly's report shows surging interest in NLP and deep learning, while data engineering and cloud skills remain in high demand. Organizations prioritize training and upskilling to address the gap.

Databricks acquires MosaicML for $1.3 billion to boost generative AI capabilities. MosaicML offers open-source models like MPT-7B and MPT-30B. The deal aims to democratize AI and reduce training costs.

The article explores the impact of AI on application developers. While AI tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot can boost productivity, they lack creativity and can hallucinate, so human developers remain essential. A survey shows only 33% of organizations use such tools, but actual usage is likely higher. Training is the biggest challenge, not ease of use.

European lawmakers overwhelmingly approved the draft EU AI Act, which categorizes AI by risk levels, requiring impact assessments for high-risk systems and banning unacceptable risk uses. The act may become a global standard but faces criticism for lack of flexibility.

Cohere, the provider of an AI development platform, announced it has raised $270 million in a Series C round led by Inovia Capital, with participation from Nvidia, Oracle, Salesforce Ventures, and others. The funding will accelerate its enterprise AI platform and customization offerings.

Weights & Biases unveiled two new products at its inaugural in-person conference: W&B Weave, an application building toolkit, and W&B Production Monitoring, an observability tool for ML models.

An Altair survey reveals high adoption of data and AI strategies, but projects stall due to organizational, technical, and financial friction. Talent shortages, low AI literacy, legacy systems, and upfront costs are key barriers. Despite high failure rates, organizations continue AI investments for long-term gains.