Amin Ahmad - CTO, Vectara - Algolia / Elasticsearch-like search product on neural search principles

Update: ZIR.AI has relaunched as Vectara: https://vectara.com/

Topics:

00:00 Intro

00:54 Amin’s background at Google Research and affinity to NLP and vector search field

05:28 Main focus areas of ZIR.AI in neural search

07:26 Does the company offer neural network training to clients? Other support provided with ranking and document format conversions

08:51 Usage of open source vs developing own tech

10:17 The core of ZIR.AI product

14:36 API support, communication protocols and P95/P99 SLAs, dedicated pools of encoders

17:13 Speeding up single node / single customer throughput and challenge of productionizing off the shelf models, like BERT

23:01 Distilling transformer models and why it can be out of reach of smaller companies

25:07 Techniques for data augmentation from Amin’s and Dmitry’s practice (key search team: margin loss)

30:03 Vector search algorithms used in ZIR.AI and the need for boolean logic in company’s client base

33:51 Dynamics of open source in vector search space and cloud players: Google, Amazon, Microsoft

36:03 Implementing a multilingual search with BM25 vs neural search and impact on business

38:56 Is vector search a hype similar to big data few years ago? Prediction for vector search algorithms influence relations databases

43:09 Is there a need to combine BM25 with neural search? Ideas from Amin and features offered in ZIR.AI product

51:31 Increasing the robustness of search — or simply making it to work

55:10 How will Search Engineer profession change with neural search in the game?

Get a $100 discount (first month free) for a 50mb plan, using the code VectorPodcast (no lock-in, you can cancel any time): https://zir-ai.com/signup/user

Vector Podcast is here to bring you the depth and breadth of Search Engine Technology, Product, Marketing, Business. In the podcast we talk with engineers, entrepreneurs, thinkers and tinkerers, who put their soul into search. Depending on your interest, you should find a matching topic for you -- whether it is deep algorithmic aspect of search engines and information retrieval field, or examples of products offering deep tech to its users. "Vector" -- because it aims to cover an emerging field of vector similarity search, giving you the ability to search content beyond text: audio, video, images and more. "Vector" also because it is all about vector in your profession, product, marketing and business.

Podcast website: https://www.vectorpodcast.com/

Dmitry is blogging on https://dmitry-kan.medium.com/

• Aantal afleveringen: 31
• Laatste aflevering: 2025-03-21
• Onderwijs Wetenschap

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