[opisthenar84]

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.

[zcw100]

Same difference as ElasticSearch and Lucene.

re: difference in layer of abstraction.

[gk1]

Weaviate calling themselves a vector database is a fairly new thing.

[opisthenar84]

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.

[thirdtrigger]

I'm affiliated with Weaviate, so maybe nice to get this out here for the record :)

We call Weaviate a "vector search engine" (i.e., we prefer "vector search engine" because it describes the type of database) since around Aug, 2020

Github: https://github.com/semi-technologies/weaviate/tree/a3967aff5...

The reason was simple; our community started to say that the mixed vector and scalar filter search capabilities were what they liked most.

Also, our benchmarks are available for quite some time here: https://weaviate.io/developers/weaviate/current/benchmarks/a...

They are based on ann-benchmarks.com but adjusted for full databases.