bootcamp VS faiss

Metadata Filtering with Zilliz Cloud Pipelines This tutorial discuss scalar or metadata filtering and how you can perform metadata filtering in Zilliz Cloud. This blog continues on the previous blog on Getting started with RAG in just 5 minutes. You can find its code in this notebook and scroll down to Cell #27.

Partially agree.

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...

Curious to learn your thoughts.

Although it's common to use vector databases in conjunction with LLMs, I like to talk about vector databases in the context of unstructured data, i.e. any data that you can vectorize with (or without) an ML model. Yes, this includes text, but it also includes things like visual data, molecular structures, and geospatial data.

For folks who want to learn a bit more, there are examples of vector database use cases beyond semantic text search in our bootcamp: https://github.com/milvus-io/bootcamp

Easy to get started: Here are some tutorials for Milvus in a Jupyter Notebook that I wrote - reverse image search, semantic text search

I think you can just store your vector embeddings in the vector store somewhere and then query with your second document. I created a short tutorial on this that shows how to get the top 2 vector embeddings from a text query

For more beginner tasks associated with the Milvus vector database, you can contribute to the Bootcamp project( https://github.com/milvus-io/bootcamp), where we build a lot of data-driven solutions using ML and Milvus vector database, including reverse image search, recommender systems, etc.

Source code here: https://github.com/milvus-io/bootcamp/tree/master/solutions/reverse_image_search

There are also FAISS binary indexes[0], so it'd be great to compare binary index vs binary index. Otherwise it seems a little misleading to say it is a FAISS vs not FAISS comparison, since really it would be a binary index vs not binary index comparison. I'm not too familiar with binary indexes, so if there's a significant difference between the types of binary index then it'd be great to explain what that is too.

[0] https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss/wiki/Binary-indexe...

Or just use FAISS https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss

You can try txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai) with a Faiss backend.

This Faiss wiki article might help (https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss/wiki/Indexing-1G-v...).

For example, a partial Faiss configuration with 4-bit PQ quantization and only using 5% of the data to train an IVF index is shown below.

faiss={"components": "IVF,PQ384x4fs", "sample": 0.05}

If you want to experiment with vector stores, you can do that locally with something like faiss which has good platform support: https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss

Doing full retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and getting LLMs to interpret the results has more steps but you get a lot of flexibility, and there's no standard best-practice. When you use a vector DB you get the most similar texts back (or an index integer in the case of faiss), you then feed those to an LLM like a normal prompt.

The codifer for the RAG workflow is LangChain, but their demo is substantially more complex and harder-to-use than even a homegrown implementation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36725982

According to this documentation page, faiss-gpu is only supported on Linux, not on Windows.

Indexes for vector databases in high dimensions are nowhere near are effective as the 2-d indexes used in GIS or the 1-d B-tree indexes that are commonly used in databases.

Back around 2005 I was interested in similarity search and read a lot of conference proceedings on the top and was basically depressed at the state of vector database indexes and felt that at least for the systems I was prototyping I was OK with a full scan and later in 2013 I had the assignment of getting a search engine for patents using vector embeddings in front of customers and we got performance we found acceptable with full scan.

My impression today is that the scene is not too different than it was in 2005 but I can't say I haven't missed anything. That is, you have tradeoffs between faster algorithms that miss some results and slower algorithms that are more correct.

I think it's already a competitive business. You have Pinecone which had the good fortune of starting before the gold rush. Many established databases are adding vector extension. I know so many engineering managers who love postgresql and they're just going to load a vector extension and go. My RSS reader YOShInOn uses SBERT embeddings to cluster and classify text and certainly More Like This and semantic search are on the agenda, I'd expect it to take about an hour to get

https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss

up and working, I could spend more time stuck on some "little" front end problem like getting something to look right in Bootstrap than it would take to get working.

I can totally believe somebody could make a better vector db than what's out there but will it be better enough? A startup going through YC now could spend 2-3 to get a really good product and find customers and that is forever in a world where everybody wants to build AI applications right now.

As the size of the codebase grows, storing and searching through embeddings in memory becomes inefficient. This is where vector databases come into play. Tools like Milvus, Faiss, and others are designed to handle large-scale vector data and provide efficient similarity search capabilities. I've wrtten about how to also use sqlite to store vector embeddings. By integrating a vector database, you can scale your code search tool to handle much larger codebases without compromising on search speed.

But FAISS has their own version ("FastScan") https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss/wiki/Fast-accumula...

https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss