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Comment by ethbr0 | Hacker News Reader

From my understanding, Databrick's core value proposition is -- 'We let you do things you want to, with the people you have.'

It may surprise HN to learn, but most companies don't have top-tier technical talent.

Consequently, how do you do {cutting edge thing board and investors are demanding company do} with the people you have/can afford? Use an offering that decreases the necessary skill level by providing powerful prebuilt components.

From this perspective, LLM integration sounds like a perfect fit. It's something every company is being asked to have a plan on, but one few are technically staffed to execute on their own.

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Databricks' core value proposition is Apache Spark in the cloud, optimized with their special sauce (eg Proton engine).

Running your own Spark, especially on prem, is a lot of work. Most companies would prefer to just provide their data and let someone else handle the query engine.

The parent is right however that Databricks has a feature store (tokenization) but it's not simple to set up and just getting content in and out of it is a major pain point right now.

> [...] LLM integration [...] is something every company is being asked to have a plan on, but one few are technically staffed to execute on their own.

But this is still the "language of hype". LLM integration to do what? I'm not saying they're not doing anything useful, just that this is not a way to describe either a productivity-enhancing technology (feature) or an actual value proposition (benefit) in a meaningful way.

> this is not how you describe a meaningful value proposition.

It depends who you're selling to. If customers are asking for a way to deal with LLMs, then providing that is a perfectly fine value proposition. The "do what" is going to depend on the customer.

Investors don't understand AI past "It will change things." Which means there needs to be a plan to deal with change.

What the end deliverable of the plan is doesn't matter: effectively it's the company demonstrating it can "do AI," so that if it becomes existentially necessary, the company's ability to execute is already known.

Absent demonstration, hell, the company might not even be retaining useful historical data. (E.g. theft data at a major US retailer)

Well, there was a time when making XML-related software would have been a driver of valuations of companies in a similar way, and engineers were asked by boards to "start doing XML".

I'm not even saying it's unmitigatedly a negative thing. When the question "What are we going to actually do with XML?" came up, many had good ideas, and useful tech investments started getting past boards that wouldn't otherwise have. -- So there was a lot of "collateral goodness".

But people also started ripping out databases and purpose-built DSLs from existing applications just so they could replace them with something XML-based.

As a way of making tech investments, it's weak. If it's 1999 and I'm asked to invest in a tech company that makes a damned good XML parser and nothing else, I'm well advised to not invest. And if I'm a CTO in a non-tech business asked to start replacing database servers with XML files, I'm well advised to not do it.

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