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Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

blog.vespa.ai

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Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#91

Post by lmm »

mathrawka wrote: post #86
lmm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just a rebranding, they've merged with Line.

It's a bit more nuanced than that. The merger was awhile ago, ZHoldings was the parent company of Yahoo! JP and Line. ZHoldings is now Line Yahoo. The footer of yahoo.co.jp has changed from Yahoo! Japan / ZHoldings to Line Yahoo.

Legally being placed under the same corporate entity was a while ago. As is normal for big acquisitions, actually merging the businesses is a much slower process (allegedly part of the reasons BA's first days of operating at Heathrow Terminal 5 were a mess is that it was the first time BEA and BOAC were actually working together).

My point is just, from what I've heard the switch to Line Yahoo reflects a real integration of the businesses, not just a change of brand.

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#92

Post by cmcollier »

This is fun to see, and for a seriously deserving team!

Vespa really is an impressive platform. I've been working with search platforms for a while, starting with FAST Instream, MarkLogic, Elastic, Weaviate, and now Vespa. As others have noted, Vespa has a deep technical lineage. You can see a lot of the hard earned lessons in the design, as well as improvements in the flaws of the spiritual predecessors (FAST et. al).

The history alone makes the project interesting. But then, in the last couple of years (or maybe earlier), they started introducing all the fundamentals for supporting deep integration of tensors and a custom HNSW implementation. Whether accident or planning, this was a nice strategic move. They were leagues ahead, just in time for the popularization of learned embeddings.

Now they have the best combination of traditional lexical search, semantic search with embeddings, and the combination of the two in hybrid search. That's without even getting to all the functionality in the multi-phase ranking, hosted ML models, and document processing engine.

Obviously I'm biased (we use Vespa at work for enterprise search products), but I can't recommend this engine/platform enough.

Congrats again to the team!

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#93

Post by weare138 »

neilk wrote: post #80
weare138 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo could have been the next AWS if it hadn't been horribly mismanaged.

It definitely could not have done that. In the same year that Google had Borg, and AWS released EC2, at Yahoo, David Filo was still personally reviewing hardware requests.

But like Amazon, Yahoo had developed scalable solutions in-house to run Yahoo. That was Amazon's motivation for launching AWS. They had already developed all these solutions for themselves and got the idea to monetize their infrastructure. I don't see why Yahoo couldn't have done the same thing. Plus Yahoo was sitting on Hadoop until it got spun off. And the kicker is Yahoo briefly started to offer enterprise big data solutions and even came up with a killer app that was years ahead of it's time called Pipes. But for some reason Yahoo just abandon everything.

People tend to forget or are to young to know just how big and innovative Yahoo was at one time. I know this may sound strange if you're younger but Yahoo was literally the Google of their era. Yahoo was absolutely *massive* at their height.

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#94

Post by [deleted] »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #88
90-00-09 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off topic... looking forward to more engineers moving to Mastodon. I have Twitter/X blocked at DNS level and still fairly frequently encounter interesting accounts that I can't check out.

Is there a particular mastodon server or set of servers that the engineering community is favoring? I know it technically doesn’t matter in a federated network, but curious anyway.

[deleted]

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#95

Post by aiunboxed »

swyx wrote: post #89
fzliu wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a "Vector Database 101" series that covers vector search and vector indexes as well: https://zilliz.com/learn/what-is-vector-database I've been meaning to dive into SCaNN and DiskANN as well, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

> I've been meaning to dive into SCaNN and DiskANN as well, but haven't gotten around to it yet. quick TLDR on both vs HNSW?

any ideas what do cloud providers like pinecone user underneath ?

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#96

Post by tristan957 »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #88
90-00-09 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off topic... looking forward to more engineers moving to Mastodon. I have Twitter/X blocked at DNS level and still fairly frequently encounter interesting accounts that I can't check out.

Is there a particular mastodon server or set of servers that the engineering community is favoring? I know it technically doesn’t matter in a federated network, but curious anyway.

I'm on fosstodon. floss.social is also big.

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#98

Post by ec109685 »

andrewstuart wrote: post #85

I forgot Yahoo exists. The biggest thing I recall about Yahoo is Jerry Yang vetoing sales to Microsoft for $35B on principle because he didn't like Microsoft. Is that what actually happened or is that a false memory?

Given Yahoo's stake in Alibaba that Jerry brokered for getting out of the China market, Yahoo's valuation actually eclipsed that $35B MSFT was going to offer ($80B): https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/07/25/yahoo-v...

"The deal for Alibaba was expensive and risky at the time, but ended up as the most lucrative bet in Silicon Valley: at today's prices, that stake would be worth more than $80 billion. Normally, such a success would preserve a company for years, but on Monday morning Yahoo announced that it would sell its operating business—the web properties without Alibaba and other investments—to Verizon for less than $5 billion, pennies on the dollar it would have commanded at its peak 15 years ago."

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#99

Post by prepend »

fsckboy wrote: post #82

> Yahoo will own a stake in the new company and will be one of Vespa’s biggest customers for a long time to come. what's usually going on in scenarios like this is either: the subsidiary is in growth mode and needs access to public capital markets to raise large amounts for building infrastructure (and sharing the expenses with others) to compete, or what has been built is going into profitability mode and the profit…

Or I suspect a third where the Vespa management team would leave and start their own company that would appreciate at a higher rate than yahoo due to greater growth potential.

So yahoo spins them out and has their equity grow faster than yahoo stock, or they lose the product to a new competitor.

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#100

Post by danielheath »

rmccue wrote: post #76
sph wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll go create my line of scooters and call it Google, see if their lawyers care about not being in the same trademark category. The Vespa is an iconic and well known brand in Italy and worldwide. If Piaggio isn't litigating it, I wonder what their lawyers are even doing.

The standard generally is whether the trademark would cause confusion to or deceive consumers. Naming a company after an existing brand which is an invented word (being a corruption of googol) would fall under the latter, and intent matters too. As to the former, trademark classes are one of the ways in which confusion is determined, but it’s not the only way for sure. That said, if it’s a word borrowed from another…

And the ruling would be fine after how many years of paying lawyers to handle endless appeals?
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