← All IntelClip / EducationTurbopuffer's launch pricing and reliability invariants
From Fireside Chat: Simon Eskildsen on Building Turbopuffer · ≈30:14
“Yeah, you could do a million vectors for a dollar.”
“I know how to run software with a lot of nines.”
“if you shut down all the VMs, like no data is lost, like all the rights are committed directly to object”
“the unit economics of what we have right now where all the vectors are in DRAM are not working”
What’s in it
- Origin story of a $1-per-million-vector database built to beat DRAM costs
- Explains how object storage plus hot caching slashed vector DB pricing 100x
- Shows how Cursor's founders spotted the DRAM cost problem and reached out
Clip transcript
too much pride to ship anything like that. Um, and I've just, you know, I've worked on I was just releasing it like a SAS project. Why can't you work on a database like it's SAS? I don't, you know, it's like if anyone uses it, we'll do it properly. I know how to run software with a lot of nines. Um, but it was not a proper LSN like it was very very it was the simplest version of what it could be. And then I released on Twitter. I was like, "Yeah, you could do a million vectors for a dollar." And before that, I think the the cheapest was maybe $100 per million for something that actually worked. >> Yeah. >> Um, and I knew it was reliable, right? I knew like I had these invariants like if you shut down all the VMs, like no data is lost, like all the rights are committed directly to object like it has all the same invariants it had today. Um and cursor reached out and knowing them now I'm sure at the time the cursor was maybe eight people and knowing the founders now I am sure that they had sat at the dinner table one day and we're like the unit economics of what we have right now where all the vectors are in DRAM are not working why hasn't anyone built it where we can put it in S3 and the actual code bases that are actively being used we can put in memory and everything else just sit in opic stores and then we just hotload it in and out of the cache >> makes so much sense right you open the codebase few seconds and it's in RAM and then the queries are as fast as anything else. It made so much sense. So I mean
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