Confused by their claim to be the 'first' vector database. These things have been around forever? For example FLANN (not a DB server, but example lib) is from 2009
I think the difference is in the layer of abstraction i.e. FLANN is just the underlying search functionality whereas vector databases are fully managed solutions. Even so, Weaviate came out in 2018, so saying that they are the "first" vector database is just flat out wrong since Pinecone was founded in 2019.
The fact that Weaviate only recently started calling themselves a vector database is completely irrelevant here. They had this type of vector data infrastructure before Pinecone did, and that's all that matters.
Example: I'm going to start a new company called Conifercone and do pretty much exactly what you do, but call it a "vector datastore" instead. Apparently I've now created the first ever vector datastore even though functionally I have done nothing novel.