Pinecone Founder and CEO Edo Liberty joins a16z's Satish Talluri and Derrick Harris to discuss the promises, challenges, and opportunities for vector databases and retrieval augmented generation (RAG). He also shares insights and highlights from a decades-long career in machine learning, which includes stints running research teams at both Yahoo and Amazon Web Services.

Because he's been at this a long time, and despite its utility, Edo understands that RAG — like most of today's popular AI concepts — is still very much a progress:

"I think RAG today is where transformers were in 2017. It's clunky and weird and hard to get right. And it has a lot of sharp edges, but it already does something amazing. Sometimes, most of the time, the very early adopters and the very advanced users are already picking it up and running with it and lovingly deal with all the sharp edges ...

"Making progress on RAG, making progress on information retrieval, and making progress on making AI more knowledgeable and less hallucinatory and more dependable, is a complete greenfield today. There's an infinite amount of innovation that will have to go into it."

More about Pinecone and RAG:

Investing in Pinecone

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)

Emerging Architectures for LLM Applications

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Edo Liberty

Satish Talluri

Derrick Harris

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