motorhead VS vectara-answer

Metal [1] is another one on my radar. Their API looks super simple.

Disclosures: None

[1] https://getmetal.io

Any alternatives? I found this Rust based project that might be interesting: https://github.com/getmetal/motorhead

you could run motorhead on docker https://github.com/getmetal/motorhead

The code is found using GitHub search FT.SEARCH inside https://github.com/getmetal/motorhead/blob/main/src/models.rs and adapted.

All the examples that Langchain gives are for persisting memory locally which won't work in a serverless (statelesss) environment, and the one solution documented for stateless applications, getmetal/motorhead, is a containerized, Rust-based service we would have to run ourselves.

I've only just signed up and haven't had a chance to build anything with it yet, but this might be something to consider https://getmetal.io/

Hi HN!

I lead product for Vectara (https://vectara.com) and we recently worked with OpenSource connections to both evaluate our new home-grown embedding model (Boomerang) as well as to help users start more quantitatively evaluating these systems on their own data/with their own queries.

OSC maintains a fantastic open source tool, Quepid, and we worked with them to integrate Vectara (and to use it to quantitatively evaluate Boomerang). We're hoping this allows more vector/hybrid players to be more transparent about the quality of their systems and any models they use instead of everyone relying on and gaming a benchmark like BIER.

More details on OSC's eval can be found at https://opensourceconnections.com/blog/2023/10/11/learning-t...

RAG is a very useful flow but I agree the complexity is often overwhelming, esp as you move from a toy example to a real production deployment. It's not just choosing a vector DB (last time I checked there were about 50), managing it, deciding on how to chunk data, etc. You also need to ensure your retrieval pipeline is accurate and fast, ensuring data is secure and private, and manage the whole thing as it scales. That's one of the main benefits of using Vectara (https://vectara.com; FD: I work there) - it's a GenAI platform that abstracts all this complexity away, and you can focus on building your application.

I agree. my experience is that hybrid search does provide better results in many cases, and is honestly not as easy to implement as may seem at first. In general, getting search right can be complicated today and the common thinking of "hey I'm going to put up a vector DB and use that" is simplistic.

Disclaimer: I'm with Vectara (https://vectara.com), we provide an end-to-end platform for building GenAI products.

In this article I discuss my long-held belief that it's time we shifted the discussion from "which vector database to use" for GenAI and instead think about "how do we make this whole architecture simpler to use", a focus of GenAI platforms like https://vectara.com

With Vectara (full disclosure: I work there; https://vectara.com) we provide a simple API to implement applications with Grounded Generation (aka retrieval augmented generation). The embeddings model, the vector store, the retrieval engine and all the other functionality - implemented by the Vectara platform, so you don't have to choose which vector DB to use, which embeddings model to use, and so on. Makes life easy and simple, and you can focus on developing your application.

You can also use vectara to implement this. Just upload the docs via the indexing API and then run queries via the search API. It tends to be less complicated with Vectara since we take care of many things internally (vectorDB, embeddings, etc). Let me know if I can help further with that.

I found vectara.com but all examples seem to be about feeding text. I'm not super technical so I may be missing something. Please let me know if I need to elaborate further.

yes agreed that if ChatGPT becomes monetized the same way as Google, then it the fun will be over. We'll have to wait and see. I think though that this innovation is not just applicable to web search or consumer search, and with products like vectara.com providing this type of user experience in the enterprise there is a significant net gain here overall.