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Show HN: Marqo – Vectorless Vector Search
Marqo is an end-to-end vector search engine. It contains everything required to integrate vector search into an application in a single API. Here is a code snippet for a minimal example of vector search with Marqo:
mq = marqo.Client()
mq.create_index("my-first-index")
mq.index("my-first-index").add_documents([{"title": "The Travels of Marco Polo"}])
results = mq.index("my-first-index").search(q="Marqo Polo")
Why Marqo?
Vector similarity alone is not enough for vector search. Vector search requires more than a vector database - it also requires machine learning (ML) deployment and management, preprocessing and transformations of inputs as well as the ability to modify search behavior without retraining a model. Marqo contains all these pieces, enabling developers to build vector search into their application with minimal effort.
Why not X, Y, Z vector database?
Vector databases are specialized components for vector similarity. They are “vectors in - vectors out”. They still require the production of vectors, management of the ML models, associated orchestration and processing of the inputs. Marqo makes this easy by being “documents in, documents out”. Preprocessing of text and images, embedding the content, storing meta-data and deployment of inference and storage is all taken care of by Marqo. We have been running Marqo for production workloads with both low-latency and large index requirements.
Marqo features:
- Low-latency (10’s ms - configuration dependent), large scale (10’s - 100’s M vectors).
- Easily integrates with LLM’s and other generative AI - augmented generation using a knowledge base.
- Pre-configured open source embedding models - SBERT, Huggingface, CLIP/OpenCLIP.
- Pre-filtering and lexical search.
- Multimodal model support - search text and/or images.
- Custom models - load models fine tuned from your own data.
- Ranking with document meta data - bias the similarity with properties like popularity.
- Multi-term multi-modal queries - allows per query personalization and topic avoidance.
- Multi-modal representations - search over documents that have both text and images.
- GPU/CPU/ONNX/PyTorch inference support.
See some examples here:
Multimodal search:
[1] https://www.marqo.ai/blog/context-is-all-you-need-multimodal-vector-search-with-personalization https://www.marqo.ai/blog/context-is-all-you-need-multimodal...
Refining image quality and identifying unwanted content:
[2] https://www.marqo.ai/blog/refining-image-quality-and-eliminating-nsfw-content-with-marqo https://www.marqo.ai/blog/refining-image-quality-and-elimina...
Question answering over transcripts of speech:
[3] https://www.marqo.ai/blog/speech-processing https://www.marqo.ai/blog/speech-processing
Question and answering over technical documents and augmenting NPC's with a backstory:
[4] https://www.marqo.ai/blog/from-iron-manual-to-ironman-augmenting-gpt-with-marqo-for-fast-editable-memory-to-enable-context-aware-question-answering https://www.marqo.ai/blog/from-iron-manual-to-ironman-augmen...
- bryanrasmussen 3y agoprobably stupid question - is there a way to use this to search over graph data - like some way to do graph embeddings here to map a graph to the vectors?
- jn2clark 3y agoGood question! At the moment if you have the abstraction of data -> model -> vector then it is amenable to searching like this. It will depend a bit on the use case though.
- loxias 3y agoI get your larger point, but the errors and phrasing are a bit off putting. Vector similarity alone _IS_ enough for vector search. That's literally what "search" means in this context! Finding another vector within an epsilon bound given a metric. After the 3rd read, I understand the point you're trying to make I think, and I think you might be right. There might be room in the market for an integrator, an all in one platform. It won't have the best performance or functionality, I doubt it would win in _any_ category. But if you can get the business model working right I could imagine such a product having sizeable market share. Hm... Edit: I'm also curious about the dimension and metric used. Any numbers about latency or size is kinda pointless without :). 1 point in 1536-D space (what OpenAI uses),4 byte float == 6KB, so even 100 million points is only 600G...
- jn2clark 3y agoI think it depends a bit on the definition of search here. It might satisfy a literal definition of search but not search as users would expect - which I think is the important point. IMHO vector similarity and vector search are conflated too much and solving search problems as users expect them requires more than similarity.
- loxias 3y agoI think you might be on to something, in thinking about it in terms of the platform from the perspective of the end user, and what they build on it. I humbly posit that you might be better off, at least from a communications/marketing perspective, ditching the "vector search without vectors" verbage because that alienates the segment that, uh, for lack of a better term, loves and understands high dimensional applied math, and computers. :) Perhaps instead find language that couches it as an entirely new category. Blue ocean. Ditch the word "vector" entirely. -$0.02