hnswlib VS Milvus

How does this compare to hsnwlib - is it faster? https://github.com/nmslib/hnswlib

Last week I released Moodflix (https://moodflix.streamlit.app), a movie recommendation engine based to find movies based on your mood.

Moodflix was created on top of a movie dataset of 10k movies from The Movie Database. I vectorised the films using Hugging Face's T5 model (https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/model_doc/t5) using the film's plot synopsis, genres and languages. Then I indexed the vectors using hnswlib (https://github.com/nmslib/hnswlib). LLMs can understand a movie's plot pretty well and distill the similarities between a user's query (mood) to the movie's plot and genres.

I have got feedback from close friends around linking movies to other review sites like IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes, linking movies to sites to stream the movie and adding movie posters. I would also love to hear from the community what things you like, what you want to see and what things you consider can be improved.

Actually the "ef" is not epsilon. It is a parameter of the HNSW index: https://github.com/nmslib/hnswlib/blob/master/ALGO_PARAMS.md...

If you want to go larger you could still use some simple setup in conjunction with faiss, annoy or hnsw.

Many vector databases are using Hnswlib and that is a supported vector index alongside Faiss and Annoy.

hnswlib (https://github.com/nmslib/hnswlib) is a strong alternative to faiss that I have enjoyed using for multiple projects. It is simple and has great performance on CPU.

After working through several projects that utilized local hnswlib and different databases for text and vector persistence, I integrated hnswlib with sqlite to create an embedded vector search engine that can easily scale up to millions of embeddings. For self-hosted situations of under 10M embeddings and less than insane throughput I think this combo is hard to beat.

https://github.com/jiggy-ai/hnsqlite

https://github.com/nmslib/hnswlib

Used it to index 40M text snippets in the legal domain. Allows incremental adding.

I love how it just works. You know, doesn’t ANNOY me or makes a FAISS. ;-)

3000 texts doesn't sound like to many, so may be a brute force cos calculation to find the most similar vector would work. If that's taking too much time, may be look at KNN or ANN modules to speed up finding the most similar vector. I use hsnwlib in knn mode for this. SOrt through about 350,000 vectors in about 30-50 msec.

hnswlib is in cpp and has python bindings (you should be able to make your own for other languages).

https://github.com/nmslib/hnswlib

embeddings - The embeddings index file. This is an Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) index with either Faiss (default), Hnswlib or Annoy, depending on the settings.

Zilliz (zilliz.com) | Hybrid/ONSITE (SF, NYC) | Full-time

I am part of the hiring team for DevRel

NYC - https://boards.greenhouse.io/zilliz/jobs/4307910005

SF - https://boards.greenhouse.io/zilliz/jobs/4317590005

Zilliz is the company behind Milvus (https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus), the most starred vector database on GitHub. Milvus is a distributed vector database that shines in 1B+ vector use cases. Examples include autonomous driving, e-commerce, and drug discovery. (and, of course, RAG)

We are also hiring for other roles that I am not personally involved in the hiring process for such as product managers, software engineers, and recruiters.

Get started with Milvus on GitHub.

Milvus: An open-source vector database designed for AI and ML applications. It excels in handling large-scale vector similarity searches, making it suitable for recommendation systems, image and video retrieval, and natural language processing tasks.

Selecting the right version of open-source Milvus is important to the success of any project leveraging vector search technology. With Milvus offering different versions of its vector database tailored to varying requirements, understanding the significance of selecting the correct version is key for achieving desired outcomes.

Milvus is an open-source vector database designed to handle large-scale similarity search and vector indexing. It supports multiple index types and offers highly efficient search capabilities, making it suitable for a wide range of AI and ML applications, including image and video recognition, natural language processing, and recommendation systems.

Zilliz is hiring! We're looking for REMOTE and/or HYBRID roles in SF

Zilliz is the company behind Milvus (https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus), the most widely adopted vector database. Vector databases are a crucial piece of any technology stack looking to take advantage of unstructured data. Most recently and notably, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). For RAG, vector databases like Milvus are used as the tool to inject customized data. In other words, vector databases make things like customized chat bots, personalized product recommendations, and more possible.

We are hiring for Developer Advocates, Senior+ Level Engineers and Product people, and Talent Acquisition. Check out all the roles here: https://zilliz.com/careers

Good on them, I know the crustaceans are out here happy about this raise for a Rust based Vector DB!

(now I'm gonna plug what I work on)

If you're interested in a more scalable vector database written in Go, check out Milvus (https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus)

But before we do, I do want to say that 🤩 all these lovely Open-Source projects would love a little 🎉💕 love by getting a GitHub star ⭐ for their efforts. Including Open Source Milvus 🥰

1. Milvus by Zilliz | Github