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MongoDB acquires Voyage AI

investors.mongodb.com

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Re: MongoDB acquires Voyage AI

#51

Post by cpursley »

orochimaaru wrote: post #42
cpursley wrote: post #23

How is MongoDB still a thing when there's already several ways to handle json in Postgres including Microsofts new documentdb extension: https://gist.github.com/cpursley/c8fb81fe8a7e5df038158bdfe0f... What am I missing? Are Mongo users simply front end folks who didn't have time to learn basic SQL or back end architecture?

We use their atlas offering. It’s a bit pricey but we are very happy with it. It’s got a bunch of stuff integrated - vectors, json (obviously), search and charting along with excellent support for drivers and very nice out of the box monitoring. Now I could possible spend a bunch of time and do the same thing with open source dbs - but why? I have a small team and stuff to deliver. Atlas allows me to do it fast.

There’s a ton of hosted Postgres providers that do all of that and more and are just as simple to use. Neon.tech is really easy to set up and if you need more of a baas (firebase alternative), Supabase. Plus, no vendor lock in. I’ve moved vendors several times, most recently AWS RDS to Neon and it was nearly seamless. Was originally on Heroku Postgres going way back. Try getting off Atlas…

Re: MongoDB acquires Voyage AI

#52

Post by moralestapia »

10x exit in a couple years, quite nice on the VC side!

On the tech side ... no idea what Mongo's plan is ... their embedding model is not SOTA, does not even outperform the open ones out there, and reranking is a dead end in 2025.

I think the value is on Voyage's team, their user base and having a vision that aligned with Mongo's.

Congrats!

Re: MongoDB acquires Voyage AI

#54

Post by htrp »

crowcroft wrote: post #48
htrp wrote: post #43

Voyage AI basically builds embedding models for vector search

You don't hear the big AI providers talk about embeddings much, but I have to believe in the long run that companies building SOTA foundational LLMs are going to ultimately have the best embedding models. Unless you can get to a point where you can make these models small enough that basically sit in the DB layer of an application...

That and because the embedding models are much easier to improve with at scale usage (hence why everyone has a deep search/research/RAG tool built into their AI web app now).

Re: MongoDB acquires Voyage AI

#55

Post by touche_bag »

moralestapia wrote: post #52

10x exit in a couple years, quite nice on the VC side! On the tech side ... no idea what Mongo's plan is ... their embedding model is not SOTA, does not even outperform the open ones out there, and reranking is a dead end in 2025. I think the value is on Voyage's team, their user base and having a vision that aligned with Mongo's. Congrats!

Interesting take. Have you benchmarked models on your own data? Cause at this point everything is contaminated so I find it impossible to tell what proper sota is. Also - most folks still just use openai. Last time I checked, reranking always performs better than pure vector search. And to my knowledge it's still the superior fusion method for keyword and vector results.

Re: MongoDB acquires Voyage AI

#56

Post by touche_bag »

hartator wrote: post #28

I rather them focus on performance. Last MongoDB is still slower than MongoDB 3.4. An almost 10-year old release. For both reads and writes.

I think 8 was a release purely focused on performance, with some big improvements. Comparing 3.4 is kinda unfair.. You were fast with the tradeoff of half your data missing half the time

Re: MongoDB acquires Voyage AI

#57

Post by hweller »

moralestapia wrote: post #52

10x exit in a couple years, quite nice on the VC side! On the tech side ... no idea what Mongo's plan is ... their embedding model is not SOTA, does not even outperform the open ones out there, and reranking is a dead end in 2025. I think the value is on Voyage's team, their user base and having a vision that aligned with Mongo's. Congrats!

>their embedding model is not SOTA, does not even outperform the open ones out there, and reranking is a dead end in 2025.

Are you referring to the MTEB leaderboard? It's widely believed many of those test datasets are considered during the training of most open-source text embedding models, hence why you see novel + private benchmarks discussed in many launch blogs that don't exclusively refer to MTEB. There are problems there, and it would be great to see more folks in the search benchmark dataset production space like what Marqo AI has done in recent months.

Also what makes you say reranking is dead? Mongo doesn't provide it out of the box but many other search providers like ES, Pinecone, Opensearch do so it must provide some value to their customers? Maybe you're saying it's overrated in terms of how many apps actually need it?

disclosure: I work on vector search at Mongo

Re: MongoDB acquires Voyage AI

#58

Post by moralestapia »

touche_bag wrote: post #55
moralestapia wrote: post #52

10x exit in a couple years, quite nice on the VC side! On the tech side ... no idea what Mongo's plan is ... their embedding model is not SOTA, does not even outperform the open ones out there, and reranking is a dead end in 2025. I think the value is on Voyage's team, their user base and having a vision that aligned with Mongo's. Congrats!

Interesting take. Have you benchmarked models on your own data? Cause at this point everything is contaminated so I find it impossible to tell what proper sota is. Also - most folks still just use openai. Last time I checked, reranking always performs better than pure vector search. And to my knowledge it's still the superior fusion method for keyword and vector results.

In my experience, storing RAG chunks with a little bit of context helps a lot when doing the retrieval, then you can skip the whole "rerank" bit and halve your cost and latency.

With embedding/generative models becoming better with time, the need for a rerank step will be optimized away.

Re: MongoDB acquires Voyage AI

#59

Post by moralestapia »

hweller wrote: post #57
moralestapia wrote: post #52

10x exit in a couple years, quite nice on the VC side! On the tech side ... no idea what Mongo's plan is ... their embedding model is not SOTA, does not even outperform the open ones out there, and reranking is a dead end in 2025. I think the value is on Voyage's team, their user base and having a vision that aligned with Mongo's. Congrats!

>their embedding model is not SOTA, does not even outperform the open ones out there, and reranking is a dead end in 2025. Are you referring to the MTEB leaderboard? It's widely believed many of those test datasets are considered during the training of most open-source text embedding models, hence why you see novel + private benchmarks discussed in many launch blogs that don't exclusively refer to MTEB. There are pro…

>Maybe you're saying it's overrated in terms of how many apps actually need it?

Yes, my comment leans more towards that, rather than suggesting is useless.

Re: MongoDB acquires Voyage AI

#60

Post by redwood »

moralestapia wrote: post #59
hweller wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>their embedding model is not SOTA, does not even outperform the open ones out there, and reranking is a dead end in 2025. Are you referring to the MTEB leaderboard? It's widely believed many of those test datasets are considered during the training of most open-source text embedding models, hence why you see novel + private benchmarks discussed in many launch blogs that don't exclusively refer to MTEB. There are pro…

>Maybe you're saying it's overrated in terms of how many apps actually need it? Yes, my comment leans more towards that, rather than suggesting is useless.

Taking a step back, accuracy/quality of retrieval is critical as input to anything generated b/c your generated output is only as good as your input. And right now folks are struggling to adopt generative use cases due to risk and fear of how to control outputs. Therefore I think this could be bigger than you think.
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