Vector DBs are critical components in retrieval systems. What most applications need are retrieval systems, rather than building blocks of retrieval systems. That doesn't mean the building blocks are not important.
As someone working on vector DB, I find many users struggling in building their own retrieval systems with building blocks such as embedding service (openai,cohere), logic orchestration framework (langchain/llamaindex) and vector databases, some even with reranker models. Putting them together is not as easy as it looks. A fairly changeling system work. Letting alone quality tuning and devops.
The struggle is no surprise to me, as tech companies who are experts on this (google,meta) all have dedicated teams working on retrieval system alone, making tons of optimizations and develop a whole feedback loop of evaluating and improving the quality. Most developers don't get access to such resource.
No one size fits all. I think there shall exist a service that democratize AI-powered retrieval, in simple words the know-how of using embedding+vectordb and a bunch of tricks to achieve SOTA retrieval quality.
With this idea I built a Retrieval-as-a-service solution, and here is its demo:
Here is an article that systematically discusses how vector retrieval and BM25 affects the search quality, in another word, what kind of systems are the past, now and future:
Vector DBs are critical components in retrieval systems. What most applications need are retrieval systems, rather than building blocks of retrieval systems. That doesn't mean the building blocks are not important.
As someone working on vector DB, I find many users struggling in building their own retrieval systems with building blocks such as embedding service (openai,cohere), logic orchestration framework (langchain/llamaindex) and vector databases, some even with reranker models. Putting them together is not as easy as it looks. A fairly changeling system work. Letting alone quality tuning and devops.
The struggle is no surprise to me, as tech companies who are experts on this (google,meta) all have dedicated teams working on retrieval system alone, making tons of optimizations and develop a whole feedback loop of evaluating and improving the quality. Most developers don't get access to such resource.
No one size fits all. I think there shall exist a service that democratize AI-powered retrieval, in simple words the know-how of using embedding+vectordb and a bunch of tricks to achieve SOTA retrieval quality.
With this idea I built a Retrieval-as-a-service solution, and here is its demo:
https://github.com/milvus-io/bootcamp/blob/master/bootcamp/R...
Or using it in LlamaIndex:
https://github.com/run-llama/llama_index/blob/main/docs/exam...
Curious to learn your thoughts.