Turbopuffer founder Simon Eskildsen argues why AI applications inherently require external search and database tools rather than relying solely on model training weights.
“When you train an AI model, you're trying to basically compress all of human knowledge into a few terabytes. That's impossible. You can't do that. At least not by any computer science or any science really known. It does not make sense that you can compress all of human knowledge into a few terabytes. What you can compress into a few terabytes is a way to reason About the world and a mental model of the world.”
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More from Simon Eskildsen
AssertionNot checkable as stated
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AssertionSupported
Eskildsen: Turbopuffer is 100x cheaper than incumbent vector databases
“The innovation of Turbo Puffer is that it is almost a hundred times cheaper than the incumbents at the time to store that coordinate system.”
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“So, okay, you might give up three orders of magnitude in write latency, but actually you don't have to give anything else up. And then you have this true two orders of magnitude decrease in the base cost of the system. That's a great compromise if you're build…”
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Disclosure
Eskildsen: Turbopuffer told seed investors it would shut down without 2024 PMF
“If Justin and I could not find product market fit by the end of 2024, we were just going to close up shop. Justin and I were very clear about this. We even told the investors Who were invited for that round in 2024 that we were going to close up shop by the en…”
Simon EskildsenOct 30, 2025▶ 45:38He built a new database in his bedroom—now he powers Cursor, Notion and Anthropic. | Simon Eskild... · PMF Show
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Eskildsen: Readwise vector recommendations would have cost $30k/month on incumbent databases
“They have hundreds of millions of articles, and it would have cost about 30 grand a month to put in the production on one of the incumbents at the time. And that was just way too much, right?”
Simon EskildsenOct 30, 2025▶ 8:27He built a new database in his bedroom—now he powers Cursor, Notion and Anthropic. | Simon Eskild... · PMF Show
Insight
Eskildsen: Generational database companies require fundamentally new workloads
“If you want to build a generational database company, you need two and a half things. The first thing that you need is that you need a new workload, because if you want to make it as a really large billion dollar plus database company, you need a reason for mo…”
Simon EskildsenOct 30, 2025▶ 16:15He built a new database in his bedroom—now he powers Cursor, Notion and Anthropic. | Simon Eskild... · PMF Show
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