Live data from Hacker News

Pinecone raises $100M Series B

pinecone.io

11–20 of 100 posts

Re: Pinecone raises $100M Series B

#12
Happy for them, has been a very smooth developer experience using Pinecone and I think there is more than meets the eye with the combined keyword+vector search and handling of filtering. It's not going to solve all problems, but it's a well scoped solution at a good time.

Re: Pinecone raises $100M Series B

#13
I honestly hope they use it to improve their documentation. I consider myself and pretty adept developer but without much background in AI and was looking for a solution for building out a recommendation engine and ended up at Pinecone.

Maybe I'm not the target audience but after spending some time poking around I couldn't honestly couldn't even figure out how to use it.

Even a simple Goole Search for "What is a Vector Database" ends up with this page.

https://www.pinecone.io/learn/vector-database/#what-is-a-vec...

Pinecone is a vector database that makes it easy for developers to add vector-search features to their applications

Um okay... what's "vector-search"? For that sake what the eff is a "Vector" to begin with? Finally after getting about a third down the page we start defining what a vector is....

Maybe I'm not their target audience but I ended up poking around for about an hour or two before just throwing up my hands and thinking it wasn't for me.

Ended up just sticking with Algolia, since we had them in place for Search anyway...

Re: Pinecone raises $100M Series B

#14

Perfect example of AI gold rush nonsense. Pinecone has zero moat and quite a few free alternatives (Faiss, Weviate, pg-vector). Their biggest selling point is that AI hype train people don’t Google “alternatives to pinecone” when cloning the newest trending repo (or I guess, ask ChatGPT).

Oracle DB has quite a few free alternatives. Yet Larry Ellison is the world's 4th wealthiest person.

Re: Pinecone raises $100M Series B

#15

Perfect example of AI gold rush nonsense. Pinecone has zero moat and quite a few free alternatives (Faiss, Weviate, pg-vector). Their biggest selling point is that AI hype train people don’t Google “alternatives to pinecone” when cloning the newest trending repo (or I guess, ask ChatGPT).

Most demos shared by people can use numpy arrays similar to this https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1647374645316968449

Re: Pinecone raises $100M Series B

#16
I’ve wanted to ask this question but I don’t know who to ask.

Can someone explain what the use case is for vector DBs like pinecone, milvus etc. vs a fully featured search engine like Vespa, ElasticSearch etc. which also support vector search features?

Is there something about running this type of index operationally that is particularly difficult?

Re: Pinecone raises $100M Series B

#17
I guess there is value in providing better dev experience here. This can be firebase/supabase equivalent for this niche.

You can always use an open-source alternative. But you probably shouldn't self-host at early stage atleast.

Re: Pinecone raises $100M Series B

#18

I’ve wanted to ask this question but I don’t know who to ask. Can someone explain what the use case is for vector DBs like pinecone, milvus etc. vs a fully featured search engine like Vespa, ElasticSearch etc. which also support vector search features? Is there something about running this type of index operationally that is particularly difficult?

Ease-of-use for python devs

Re: Pinecone raises $100M Series B

#19

I honestly hope they use it to improve their documentation. I consider myself and pretty adept developer but without much background in AI and was looking for a solution for building out a recommendation engine and ended up at Pinecone. Maybe I'm not the target audience but after spending some time poking around I couldn't honestly couldn't even figure out how to use it. Even a simple Goole Search for "What is a Vect…

I don't have an ML background and have found the examples pretty easy to follow. https://docs.pinecone.io/docs/examples

Re: Pinecone raises $100M Series B

#20

Perfect example of AI gold rush nonsense. Pinecone has zero moat and quite a few free alternatives (Faiss, Weviate, pg-vector). Their biggest selling point is that AI hype train people don’t Google “alternatives to pinecone” when cloning the newest trending repo (or I guess, ask ChatGPT).

It has a moat for those that start using it. Vendor lock in.
Post reply on HN