All About Vector Databases
Building AI-Powered Search and Recommendations
Good morning!
Have you ever wondered how can Netflix or Spotify recommend us the best series to watch or a song to listen to when it’s hard to find what we want in a basic Excel sheet?
While spreadsheets are pretty straightforward, platforms like Netflix know your interests and store them efficiently in their databases. And it’s not just a bunch of Excel sheets. The spreadsheet is like a traditional database, whereas vector databases power the recommendation systems we see today.
In this iteration, we dive into what precisely a vector database is, how it stores and searches data, the difference between indexing and a database, and the newest trends in vector databases. These are all really useful concepts for an AI engineer today playing with LLMs. Let’s dive right in with the 6th video out of 10 we share from our Towards AI new course!
Watch the video (or read the written article):
Discover the Skills You Need to Thrive in AI Development! This is the second video in our "From Beginner to Advanced LLM Developer" series by Towards AI, part of an 85+ lesson hands-on course designed to take you from zero to building scalable, cutting-edge LLM products.
Whether you're a software developer, ML engineer, aspiring entrepreneur, or an AI/CS student, this course gives you the real-world expertise to build, deploy, and manage advanced AI solutions. You'll work with tools like Python, OpenAI, LlamaIndex, Gradio, and others, while gaining invaluable insights into the entrepreneurial mindset and communication skills unique to the AI world.
💡 What makes this course stand out?
Build your first advanced AI product and portfolio-worthy projects.
Learn practical LLM skills like Prompting, RAG, Fine-Tuning, and Agent Design.
Industry-aligned lessons to help you transition into high-demand LLM developer roles or scale AI innovation in your company.
This journey goes beyond code—it’s a roadmap to making your competitive edge with tons of information on the future of AI development, which we termed "LLM developer."
🎯 Ready to take the leap? Check out the course here and don’t forget to explore our book (or e-book), Building LLMs for Production, for an even deeper dive into the LLM revolution.
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Thank you for reading, and I wish you a fantastic week! Be sure to have enough sleep and physical activities next week!
Louis-François Bouchard