Title: Hey HN! We are building Epsilla (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;epsilla-cloud&#x2F;vectordb">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;epsilla-cloud&#x2F;vectordb</a>), an open-source, self-hostable vector database for semantic similarity search that specializes in low query latency.<p>When do we need a vector database? For example, GPT-3.5 has a 16k context window limit. If we want to let it answer a question about a 300 page book, we cannot put the whole book content into the context. We have to choose the sections of the book that are most relevant to the question. Vector database is specialized at ranking and picking the most relevant content from a large pool of documents based on their semantic similarity.<p>Most vector databases utilize hierarchical navigational small world (HNSW) for indexing the vectors for high precision vector search, and its latency significantly degrades when the precision target is higher than 95%.<p>At a previous company, we worked on building the parallel graph traversal engine. We realized that the bottleneck of HNSW performance is because there are too many sequential traversal steps that don&#x27;t fully leverage multi-core CPU computation resources. After some research, we found that there are algorithms such as SpeedANN that are targeting this problem, which is not leveraged by industry yet. So we built the Epsilla vector database to turn the research into a production system.<p>With Epsilla, we shoot for 10x lower vector search latency compared to HNSW based vector databases. We did an initial benchmark against the top open source vector databases: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@richard_50832&#x2F;benchmarking-epsilla-with-some-of-the-top-vector-databases-543e2b7708e5" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@richard_50832&#x2F;benchmarking-epsilla-with-...</a><p>We provide a Docker image for you to install Epsilla backend locally, and provide a Python client and a JavaScript client to connect and interact with it.<p>Quickstart:<p><pre><code>      docker pull epsilla&#x2F;vectordb

      docker run --pull=always -d -p 8888:8888 epsilla&#x2F;vectordb

      pip install pyepsilla

      git clone https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;epsilla-cloud&#x2F;epsilla-python-client.git

      cd examples

      python hello_epsilla.py

</code></pre>
We just started a month ago. We&#x27;d love to hear what you think, and more importantly, what you wish to see in the future. We are thinking about a serverless vector database on cloud with a consumption based pricing model, and we are eager to get your feedback.
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