pgvector VS google-research

# Install Postgres and pgvector !apt-get update && apt install postgresql postgresql-server-dev-14 !git clone --branch v0.6.2 https://github.com/pgvector/pgvector.git !cd pgvector && make && make install # Start database !service postgresql start !sudo -u postgres psql -U postgres -c "ALTER USER postgres PASSWORD 'pass';"

When talking about Vector Databases, in the market we can find the specialized ones and multi-model, most of the major database providers like Oracle, PostgreSQL or MongoDB, for mention some of them, have integrated a specific solution to retrieve vector data.

For this example, I wanted to focus on how pgvector  – an open-source vector similarity search for Postgres – can be used to identify data similarities that exist in enterprise data.

pgvector supports dense vector search well, but it does not have plan to support sparse vector.

There's an issue in the pgvector repo about someone having several ~10-20million row tables and getting acceptable performance with the right hardware and some performance tuning: https://github.com/pgvector/pgvector/issues/455

I'm in the early stages of evaluating pgvector myself. but having used pinecone I currently am liking pgvector better because of it being open source. The indexing algorithm is clear, one can understand and modify the parameters. Furthermore the database is postgresql, not a proprietary document store. When the other data in the problem is stored relationally, it is very convenient to have the vectors stored like this as well. And postgresql has good observability and metrics. I think when it comes to flexibility for specialized applications, pgvector seems like the clear winner. But I can definitely see pinecone's appeal if vector search is not a core component of the problem/business, as it is very easy to use and scales very easily

The Spring AI project aims to streamline the development of applications that incorporate artificial intelligence functionality without unnecessary complexity. On this example we use features like: Embedding, Prompts, ETL and save all embedding on PGvector(Postgres Vector database)

Official GitHub repository of the pgvector extension

pgvector 0.6.0 was just released and will be available on Supabase projects soon. Again, a special shout out to Andrew Kane and everyone else who worked on parallel index builds.

The pgvector extension adds vector similarity search capabilities to your PostgreSQL database. To use the extension, you have to first create it in your database. You can install the extension, by connecting to your database and running the CREATE EXTENSION command from the psql command prompt:

People on here will be happy to say that I do a similar thing, however my sequence length is dynamic because I also use a 2nd data structure - I'll use pretentious academic speak: I use a simple bigram LM (2-gram) for single next-word likeliness and separately a trie that models all words and phrases (so, n-gram). Not sure how many total nodes because sentence lengths vary in training data, but there are about 200,000 entry points (keys) so probably about 2-10 million total nodes in the default setup.

"Constructing 7-gram LM": They likely started with bigrams (what I use) which only tells you the next word based on 1 word given, and thought to increase accuracy by modeling out more words in a sequence, and eventually let the user (developer) pass in any amount they want to model (https://github.com/google-research/google-research/blob/5c87...). I thought of this too at first, but I actually got more accuracy (and speed) out of just keeping them as bigrams and making a totally separate structure that models out an n-gram of all phrases (e.g. could be a 24-token long sequence or 100+ tokens etc. I model it all) and if that phrase is found, then I just get the bigram assumption of the last token of the phrase. This works better when the training data is more diverse (for a very generic model), but theirs would probably outperform mine on accuracy when the training data has a lot of nearly identical sentences that only change wildly toward the end - I don't find this pattern in typical data though, maybe for certain coding and other tasks there are those patterns though. But because it's not dynamic and they make you provide that number, even a low number (any phrase longer than 2 words) - theirs will always have to do more lookup work than with simple bigrams and they're also limited by that fixed number as far as accuracy. I wonder how scalable that is - if I need to train on occasional ~100-word long sentences but also (and mostly) just ~3-word long sentences, I guess I set this to 100 and have a mostly "undefined" trie.

I also thought of the name "LMJS", theirs is "jslm" :) but I went with simply "next-token-prediction" because that's what it ultimately does as a library. I don't know what theirs is really designed for other than proving a concept. Most of their code files are actually comments and hypothetical scenarios.

I recently added a browser example showing simple autocomplete using my library: https://github.com/bennyschmidt/next-token-prediction/tree/m... (video)

And next I'm implementing 8-dimensional embeddings that are converted to normalized vectors between 0-1 to see if doing math on them does anything useful beyond similarity, right now they look like this:

  [nextFrequency, prevalence, specificity, length, firstLetter, lastLetter, firstVowel, lastVowel]

The change was literally just made: https://github.com/google-research/google-research/commit/4a...

It appears this was in response to Hacker News comments.

There are options such as Google's ScaNN that may let you go farther before needing to consider specialized databases.

https://github.com/google-research/google-research/blob/mast...

I feel it was unnecesary to create this because https://research.google/ already exists? It just seems like they want to take another URL with a "pure" domain name instead of psubdirectories, etc parts.

https://github.com/google-research/google-research/blob/mast...

You could also try some dedicated translation models like https://huggingface.co/facebook/nllb-moe-54b (or https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/madlad_400 for something smaller) and see how they do.

Google released T5X checkpoints for MADLAD-400 a couple of months ago, but nobody could figure out how to run them. Turns out the vocabulary was wrong, but they uploaded the correct one last week.