LLMs-from-scratch VS Weaviate

https://www.manning.com/books/build-a-large-language-model-f...

The attention mechanism we implement in this book* is specific to LLMs in terms of the text inputs, but it's fundamentally the same attention mechanism that is used in vision transformers. The only difference is that in LLMs, you turn text into tokens, and convert these tokens into vector embeddings that go into an LLM. In vision transformers, instead of regarding images as tokens, you use an image patch as a token and turn those into vector embeddings (a bit hard to explain without visuals here). In both text or vision context, it's the same attention mechanism, and it both cases it receives vector embeddings.

(*Chapter 3, already submitted last week and should be online in the MEAP soon, in the meantime the code along with the notes is also available here: https://github.com/rasbt/LLMs-from-scratch/blob/main/ch03/01...)

In this tutorial, I introduce Weaviate, an open-source vector database, with the thenlper/gte-base embedding model from Alibaba, through Hugging Face's transformers library.

This will be solved in Weaviate https://github.com/weaviate/weaviate/issues/2424

Link to GitHub -->

Hey @rvrs, I work on Weaviate and we are doing some improvements around increasing write throughput:

1. gRPC. Using gRPC to write vectors has had a really nice performance boost. It is released in Weaviate core but here is still some work on do on the clients. Feel free to get in contact if you would like to try it out.

2. Parameter tuning. lowering `efConstruction` can speed up imports.

3. We are also working on async indexing https://github.com/weaviate/weaviate/issues/3463 which will further speed things up.

In comparison with pgvector, Weaviate has more flexible query options such as hybrid search and quantization to save memory on larger datasets.