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A comment on Vector database that can index 1B vectors in 48M. Parent comment

Re:Vector database that can index 1B vectors in 48M by HEmanZ on Friday September 12, 2025 @02:45PM (#45225255)
What do you think an alternative is for someone who:

1. Has a technical system they think could be worth a fortune to large enterprises, containing at least a few novel insights to the industry.

2. Knows that competitors and open source alternatives could copy/implement these in a year or so if the product starts off open source.

3. Has to put food on the table and doesn’t want to give massive corporations extremely valuable software for free.

Open source has its place, but it is IMO one of the ways to give monopolies massive value for free. There are plenty of open source alternatives around for vector DBs. Do we (developers) need to give everything away to the rich

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Re:Vector database that can index 1B vectors in 48M by mhuffman on Friday September 12, 2025 @04:22PM (#45226314)
Traditionally the most profitable approach is offering enterprise support and consulting.
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Re:Vector database that can index 1B vectors in 48M by cluckindan on Friday September 12, 2025 @04:27PM (#45226362)
Enterprises are so very fond of choosing novel open source technologies, too!

(not)

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Re:Vector database that can index 1B vectors in 48M by gloomyday on Friday September 12, 2025 @05:34PM (#45227028)
I have been working for 4 years with "enterprise" software, and I feel like the whole field is some kind of collective insanity.
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Re:Vector database that can index 1B vectors in 48M by OutOfHere on Friday September 12, 2025 @05:45PM (#45227138)
Let's say the best open source product has a feature score of 70/100, and the best closed source product has a feature score of 85/100, and this is me being generous with the latter. The issue is that just by being closed source, it immediately loses 20/100, bringing its score to 65/100, which is below the open offering. A closed source product carries substantial risk if the company behind it were to stop maintaining it, which is why the adjustment by -20 applies.

Secondly, as I know, the blocker with approximate neighbor search is often not insertion, but search. And if this search was worth a fortune to me, I'd simply embarrassingly parallelize it on CPUs or on GPUs.

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