Former Vespa Chief Scientist Jo Kristian Bergum discusses the rapid feature development of pgvector compared to dedicated vector database companies.
Opinion
Bergum: The standalone vector database infrastructure category is dying
“I'm not saying that the companies are dying, right? I'm just saying that the separate infrastructure category is dying, right? Because you have vector search capabilities in almost any DB technology nowadays, right?”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Bergum: Pinecone will not endure like MongoDB because it is too narrow
“So there's always like this convergence, but MongoDB kind of, it sticks, but I don't think that for Pinecoin that was originally leading that movement, it won't like stick in the same way.
It's too narrow.
It's too, too narrow.”
Opinion
Bergum: In-database ML like PostgresML is the wrong architectural direction
“No, I'm not. I'm sorry. I, I'm not. I think this is, yeah, we also seen other players that tries to, you know, move a lot of the logic into the database, agentic embedding inference and whatnot. I think if the right direction is to Keep infrastructure a little…”
Insight
Bergum: Building knowledge graphs is the bottleneck in Graph RAG, not databases
“The core issue issue is actually to build the knowledge graph, right? The entities, the relationships. So if you say graph, graph, You know, databases or graph rag is going to kill vector rag and all that discussion. I think the first issue is to actually buil…”
Insight
Bergum: Search, not vector storage, is the natural abstraction for RAG
“I think that's a more natural abstraction for connecting AI with knowledge and all the arguments for doing rag. I think the natural concept there is search.”
Opinion
Bergum: Standalone embedding API startups face a difficult business model
“I think it's a difficult business model to be in, like, because you have to have an API based service and you have to do batching and you have to make up for the compute and then, you know, are people willing to pay for it? And I think maybe that's why Voyage …”