txtai VS Vectara Neural Search

I tend to agree with this sentiment. Many junior devs and/or those in college want to contribute. Then they feel entitled to merge a PR that they worked hard on often without guidance. I'm all for working with people but projects have standards and not all ideas make sense. In many cases, especially with commercial open source, the project is the base of a companies identity. So it's not just for drive-by ideas to... - Source: Hacker News / 17 days ago

Bootstrapping only works if you have the runway to do it and you don't feel the need to grow fast. With NeuML (https://neuml.com), I've went the bootstrapping route. I've been able to build a fairly successful open source project (txtai 6K stars https://github.com/neuml/txtai) and a revenue positive company. It's a "live within your means" strategy. VC funding can have... - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago

I agree that in many cases people are puffing their feathers to try to be something they're not (at least not yet). Some believe in the fake it until you make it mentality. With NeuML (https://neuml.com), the website is a simple HTML page. On social media, I'm honest about what NeuML is, that I'm in my 40s with a family and not striving to be the next Steve Jobs. I've been able to build a fairly successful open... - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago

I'll add txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai) to the list. There is still plenty of room for innovation in this space. Just need to focus on the right projects that are innovating and not the ones (re)working on problems solved in 2020/2021. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago

Nice project! I've long used Tika for document parsing given it's maturity and wide number of formats supported. The XHTML output helps with chunking documents for RAG. Here's a couple examples: - https://neuml.hashnode.dev/build-rag-pipelines-with-txtai - https://neuml.hashnode.dev/extract-text-from-documents Disclaimer: I'm the primary author of txtai ( - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago

Nice to see yet another open source approach to LLM/RAG. For those who do not want to meddle with the complexity of do-it-youself, Vectara (https://vectara.com) provides a RAG-as-a-service approach - pretty helpful if you want to stay away from having to worry about all the details, scalability, security, etc - and just focus on building your RAG application. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago

You should also check us out (https://vectara.com) - we provide RAG as a service so you don't have to do all the heavy lifting and putting together the pieces yourself. Source: 5 months ago

Hi HN! I lead product for Vectara (https://vectara.com) and we recently worked with OpenSource connections to both evaluate our new home-grown embedding model (Boomerang) as well as to help users start more quantitatively evaluating these systems on their own data/with their own queries. OSC maintains a fantastic open source tool, Quepid, and we worked with them to integrate Vectara (and to use it to... - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago

RAG is a very useful flow but I agree the complexity is often overwhelming, esp as you move from a toy example to a real production deployment. It's not just choosing a vector DB (last time I checked there were about 50), managing it, deciding on how to chunk data, etc. You also need to ensure your retrieval pipeline is accurate and fast, ensuring data is secure and private, and manage the whole thing as it... - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago

I agree. My experience is that hybrid search does provide better results in many cases, and is honestly not as easy to implement as may seem at first. In general, getting search right can be complicated today and the common thinking of "hey I'm going to put up a vector DB and use that" is simplistic. Disclaimer: I'm with Vectara (https://vectara.com), we provide an end-to-end platform for building GenAI products. - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago