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Honest question, I just want to learn, what are vector databases used for?
by fifilura 1y ago
Honest question, I just want to learn, what are vector databases used for?
- aaronblohowiak 1y agofinding similar things quickly, where the "shape" of a thing can be defined by a vector (like embeddings for instance). this can be used in lots of machine learning applications
- fifilura 1y agoI figured it would be something like this. And vectors as rows in a regular table would be too slow then?
- sandyarmstrong 1y agosqlite does not have native support for a vector-like column type. Extensions like this and sqlite-vec build on the BLOB column type, and provide additional functions to let you efficiently search and manipulate this vector data.
- simonw 1y agoThey're useful for embeddings, which let you turn articles (and images and other content) into a huge array of floating point numbers that capture the semantics of the content. Then you can use a vector database to find similar items to each other - or similar items to the user's own search query. I wrote a big tutorial about embeddings a couple of years ago which still holds up today: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Oct/23/embeddings/ https://simonwillison.net/2023/Oct/23/embeddings/
- bawolff 1y agoEveryone is saying AI, but also things like image similarity search.