txtai VS annoy

I tend to agree with this sentiment. Many junior devs and/or those in college want to contribute. Then they feel entitled to merge a PR that they worked hard on often without guidance. I'm all for working with people but projects have standards and not all ideas make sense. In many cases, especially with commercial open source, the project is the base of a companies identity. So it's not just for drive-by ideas to pad a resume or finish a school project.

For those who do want to do this, I'd recommend writing an issue and/or reaching out to the developers to engage in a dialogue. This takes work but it will increase the likelihood of a PR being merged.

Disclaimer: I'm the primary developer of txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai), an open-source vector database + RAG framework

txtai is an all-in-one embeddings database for semantic search, LLM orchestration and language model workflows.

Bootstrapping only works if you have the runway to do it and you don't feel the need to grow fast.

With NeuML (https://neuml.com), I've went the bootstrapping route. I've been able to build a fairly successful open source project (txtai 6K stars https://github.com/neuml/txtai) and a revenue positive company. It's a "live within your means" strategy.

VC funding can have a snowball effect where you need more and more. Then you're in the loop of needing funding rounds to survive. The hope is someday you're acquired or start turning a profit.

I would say both have their pros and cons. Not all ideas have the luxury of time.

I agree that in many cases people are puffing their feathers to try to be something they're not (at least not yet). Some believe in the fake it until you make it mentality.

With NeuML (https://neuml.com), the website is a simple HTML page. On social media, I'm honest about what NeuML is, that I'm in my 40s with a family and not striving to be the next Steve Jobs. I've been able to build a fairly successful open source project (txtai 6K stars https://github.com/neuml/txtai) and a revenue positive company. For me, authenticity and being genuine is most important. I would say that being genuine has been way more of an asset than liability.

I'll add txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai) to the list.

There is still plenty of room for innovation in this space. Just need to focus on the right projects that are innovating and not the ones (re)working on problems solved in 2020/2021.

txtai is an all-in-one embeddings database for semantic search, LLM orchestration and language model workflows.

Nice project! I've long used Tika for document parsing given it's maturity and wide number of formats supported. The XHTML output helps with chunking documents for RAG.

Here's a couple examples:

- https://neuml.hashnode.dev/build-rag-pipelines-with-txtai

- https://neuml.hashnode.dev/extract-text-from-documents

Disclaimer: I'm the primary author of txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai).

The focus on the top 10 in vector search is a product of wanting to prove value over keyword search. Keyword search is going to miss some conceptual matches. You can try to work around that with tokenization and complex queries with all variations but it's not easy.

Vector search isn't all that new a concept. For example, the annoy library (https://github.com/spotify/annoy) has been around since 2014. It was one of the first open source approximate nearest neighbor libraries. Recommendations have always been a good use case for vector similarity.

Recommendations are a natural extension of search and transformers models made building the vectors for natural language possible. To prove the worth of vector search over keyword search, the focus was always on showing how the top N matches include results not possible with keyword search.

In 2023, there has been a shift towards acknowledging keyword search also has value and that a combination of vector + keyword search (aka hybrid search) operates in the sweet spot. Once again this is validated through the same benchmarks which focus on the top 10.

On top of all this, there is also the reality that the vector database space is very crowded and some want to use their performance benchmarks for marketing.

Disclaimer: I am the author of txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai), an open source embeddings database

If you want to go larger you could still use some simple setup in conjunction with faiss, annoy or hnsw.

I then use annoy to compare them. Annoy can use different measures for distance, like cosine, euclidean and more

Yes you can do this for equality predicates if your row groups are sorted . This blog post (that I didn't write) might add more color. You can't do this for any kind of text searching. If you need to do this with file based storage I'd recommend using a vector based text search and utilize a ANN index library like Annoy.

If you need large scale (1000+ dimension, millions+ source points, >1000 queries per second) and accept imperfect results / approximate nearest neighbors, then other people have already mentioned some of the best libraries (FAISS, Annoy).

Would be possible to further speed up the process with using something like ANNOY? https://github.com/spotify/annoy

I like Faiss but I tried Spotify's annoy[1] for a recent project and was pretty impressed.

Since lots of people don't seem to understand how useful these embedding libraries are here's an example. I built a thing that indexes bouldering and climbing competition videos, then builds an embedding of the climber's body position per frame. I then can automatically match different climbers on the same problem.

It works pretty well. Since the body positions are 3D it works reasonably well across camera angles.

The biggest problem is getting the embedding right. I simplified it a lot above because I actually need to embed the problem shape itself because otherwise it matches too well: you get frames of people in identical positions but on different problems!

[1] https://github.com/spotify/annoy

If you just want quick in memory search then pynndescent is a decent option: it's easy to install, and easy to get running. Another good option is Annoy; it's just as easy to install and get running with python, but it is a little less performant if you want to do a lot of queries, or get a knn-graph quickly.