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I love this idea, but there's no way a managed service like this is going to work, for two reasons: Performance and compliance. Compliance is pretty obvious an
by malux85 6y ago
I love this idea, but there's no way a managed service like this is going to work, for two reasons: Performance and compliance.
Compliance is pretty obvious and even if you don't store the feature dictionaries and only the vectors, that's a hard conversation to have with the compliance team. I GET IT, without the feature dictionaries the vectors are useless, I KNOW this is how it works from a technical point of view, but the compliance team still won't sign off on it. That's just the way of the world.
And much much more important is performance, uncompressed high dimensional features are huge and even if you use run-length-encoding or sparse vector storage in the protocol plus some lossless compression, I have trouble keeping the GPU fed from disk, let alone over the network, it's going to be multiple orders of magnitude too slow. If the benefits is not claimed to be streaming but are fast vector similarity, keep in mind I can do cosine similarity on literally millions of vectors a second on a single CPU core using vanilla numpy, this was fast enough for me to implement realtime face recognition vector search for Dubai airport, so pretty high scale operations.
I've love a self hosted version of this, optimised for I/O throughput to the GPU. That would be great.
- _fudu 6y agoYou bring up two viable points of view. Compliance is hard to get around. There are products that have done this by sheer force of their cyber security budgets such as large cloud providers which are HIPAA compliant. As a result, companies that require thorough compliance measures are simply not our target audience. Your second point about performance is critical to almost all of our target audience. First of all, there are self-hosted versions of this such as Facebook’s FAISS (has GPU acceleration), Spotify’s ANNOY, Elastic search KNN search and Milvus. We plan to optimize performance using the latest ANN algorithms, caching, being as close to the wire (Non-REST) transmission of vectors, dimensionally reduction e.t.c. At the end of the day, our stack will probably not be as fast as a self-hosted version but it’ll confer other advantages that we hope ML engineers will find useful similarly to AWS RDS or DynamoDB.