tldrstory VS faiss

['Introducing txtai, an AI-powered search engine built on Transformers Add Natural Language Understanding to any application Search is the base of many applications.', 'Once data starts to pile up, users want to be able to find it.', 'It’s the foundation of the internet and an ever-growing challenge that is never solved or done.', 'The field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) is rapidly evolving with a number of new developments.', 'Large-scale general language models are an exciting new capability allowing us to add amazing functionality quickly with limited compute and people.', 'Innovation continues with new models and advancements coming in at what seems a weekly basis.', 'This article introduces txtai, an AI-powered search engine that enables Natural Language Understanding (NLU) based search in any application.', 'Introducing txtai txtai builds an AI-powered index over sections of text.', 'txtai supports building text indices to perform similarity searches and create extractive question-answering based systems.', 'txtai also has functionality for zero-shot classification.', 'txtai is open source and available on GitHub.', 'txtai and/or the concepts behind it has already been used to power the Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications listed below: • paperai — AI-powered literature discovery and review engine for medical/scientific papers • tldrstory — AI-powered understanding of headlines and story text • neuspo — Fact-driven, real-time sports event and news site • codequestion — Ask coding questions directly from the terminal Build an Embeddings index For small lists of texts, the method above works.', 'But for larger repositories of documents, it doesn’t make sense to tokenize and convert all embeddings for each query.', 'txtai supports building pre- computed indices which significantly improves performance.', 'Building on the previous example, the following example runs an index method to build and store the text embeddings.', 'In this case, only the query is converted to an embeddings vector each search.', 'https://github.com/neuml/codequestion https://neuspo.com/ https://github.com/neuml/tldrstory https://github.com/neuml/paperai Introducing txtai, an AI-powered search engine built on Transformers Add Natural Language Understanding to any application Introducing txtai Build an Embeddings index']

tldrstory - AI-powered understanding of headlines and story text

tldrstory has full-stack implementation of a zero-shot classification system using Streamlit, FastAPI and Hugging Face Transformers. There is also a Medium article describing tldrstory and zero-shot classification.

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