Jerry Liu is the co-founder and CEO of LlamaIndex. He explains why data ingestion and extraction for large language models require a new paradigm compared to classic data warehousing.
Disclosure
LlamaIndex is not building a vector database, integrates with 12-20 existing ones
“We're not building our own vector database, but we have a rich set of integrations with, you know like 12 to like 20 different vector databases out there these days.”
Disclosure
LlamaIndex focuses on data infrastructure while LangChain builds broader application frameworks
“Blind train is a great application framework for you to just like get us out of building blocks for a lot of different components, for instance, from like LL modules to prompts to some basic like retrieval and vector database abstractions to like also agent fr…”
Assertion Contradicted
Liu: Uber and Instabase use LlamaIndex for enterprise data applications
“We've seen people build these workflows at different settings from, for instance, like hacks on projects at startups building, for instance, like track GPT, like, plugin over, like, your Slack or your Notion all the way to kind of, like, bigger companies, for …”
Insight
Liu: Generating long-form content over custom data remains a hard problem
“Generating something that's like a paragraph is pretty easy for ChatGPT to do. Generating like an entire blog post or essay, especially over your data is a pretty challenging problem.”
Insight
Jerry Liu: Injecting metadata into text chunks improves LLM retrieval performance
“Second is being able to inject metadata actually is quite important to actually improve retrieval performance of like the downstream application, because like, you know, let's say you're splitting up like a sec, 10 K filing into a bunch of chunks within a sing…”
Assertion Supported
Liu: LlamaHub features over 100 community-contributed data loaders
“And so these days, like Lama Hub is a very rich repository of, like, you know, the hundred plus, like, different data loaders from all different services and formats, and it's growing, like, every day.”