[bobismyuncle]

Astra DB seems to just be a tutorial showing how to generate embeddings using another service.

Weaviate seems to have added a similar capability — kind of wild that they announced on the same day.

Looks like Pinecone also includes reranking as part of the same process — did Weaviate add that as well?

[tejaskumar_]

No doubt, it's technically great that Pinecone trained their own embeddings model—but from a business/customer standpoint I can't help but ask _why?_. This is one of those "build it or buy it" cases where teams must decide to either integrate with an existing solution or build their own. I'm not sure I see the advantage (from an end user perspective) of using Pinecone's home-rolled embeddings model other than, say OpenAI's, especially given the cost factor: OpenAI embeddings costs really not much.

> Astra DB seems to just be a tutorial showing how to generate embeddings using another service.

The link I shared showed how a single request to Astra DB's data API has Astra DB automatically create embeddings behind the scenes, integrating with an embedding service the user chooses when they set their database up. Indeed embeddings are generated by another service and not in-house, but from an end-user perspective, they don't need to generate embeddings themeselves as was the prior art and coordinate requests between:

- get text - generate embeddings - take embeddings and send to DB

As of May when they announced Vectorize, one request did all that. I believe from an end-user experience, this is really analogous to what Weaviate and Pinecone are offering unless I'm missing something.

[mritchie712]

The only reason I can see for this is to create lock-in. I'd be pretty surprised if anymore than 5% of their customers would want a model by pinecone.