About this episode
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 Follow everyone on X: Edo Liberty Satish Talluri Derrick Harris Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here , including articles, projects, and more podcasts. Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.