From the course: Introduction to AI-Native Vector Databases

The superpower of vector databases

From the course: Introduction to AI-Native Vector Databases

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The superpower of vector databases

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What types of data files do you have on your computer, phone, or tablet? Family photos. Music. Video recordings. Text documents. Emails. Call recordings. Music videos. Let's think about what it means to search and find specific files on our devices. What if I ask you to search for a photo of your dog, or the last hip-hop song you listen to, or if I played a tune and asked you to pull up the most similar sounding song to that tune? What if I showed you an image and asked you to pull up a video talking about similar concepts? Searching over files and finding similar ones is one of the most common things we do on our devices, and vector databases enable this critical functionality. The superpower of vector databases is that they understand your data using artificial intelligence, and let you search over billions of files. They can tell you exactly how similar two files are, and can perform thousands of searches in the blink of an eye. Let's look at some real world applications enabled by vector databases. You can search for text documents using a text query known as text-to-text search. For example, let's say you search for email from your boss. They can retrieve the correct email. You can search for images using a text query known as text-to-image search. For example, let's say you search for photos of my dog and this image might come up. Or imagine you want to search for an image using an audio file known as audio-to-image search. For example, you could search for the sound of a lion roaring and get back images that match. The possibilities are endless. Think of what you could build with this type of search functionality at your fingertips. Vector databases understand all of these forms of data, and allow you to search over billions of these files to find the most relevant ones in real-time. Want to find out how they do it? Well, come along and join me in this course as we dive into how vector databases enable all of these applications and more.

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