Milvus VS faiss

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

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

Not a model, but I would use this Dense Passage Retrieval for Open Domain QA simply fine-tuning two BERT models, one for questions and one for queries, and then fine-tuning using contrastive loss between positive key/value pairs of document embeddings (the [CLS]) token. You can then use a vector database (Like Faiss, Elasticsearch, Vespa or similar) for querying the question.