PostgresML raises $4.7M to launch serverless AI app databases based on Postgres | Hacker News Reader

PostgresML raises $4.7M to launch serverless AI app databases based on Postgres

postgresml.org

55 pointskiyanwang24 comments

Did Postgres give them permission to use the name? IANAL but seems this would be a violation of their trademark policy, no? https://www.postgresql.org/about/policies/trademarks/

> For pretty much any use not discussed above, you must contact us for permission before you use our marks. For example, if you want to use our marks (or some variant of them) in your company name, product name or domain name, you must obtain prior approval.

Wow, yeah! This is spelled out exactly. I do wonder if they have written approval for this? Not that this is any of my business, of course!

Came here to say the same! Surprised they were able to raise money on that name.

Are they officially affiliated with the postgres product? Or just trying to seize on the brand?

So many keywords and not a lot of info about what this actually does. I am feeling more and more that most AI stuff being funded now is just crypto 2.0.

Well it's there in the name, they add machine learning to Postgres. They are not the only ones doing this, I am working on a similar idea and I don't think all of us are as misguided as the crypto bros of 2022. This is as much about Postgres as it is about AI. No one has yet successfully communicated what those in the know are seeing, and it is sort of hard to explain but relational databases are a good match for AI. Personally my strategy is to try to build compelling application instead of an infrastructure play, but to each its own and I wish them the best.

Okay, but can you elaborate on "PostgreSQL + AI".

This maybe seems like a dumb question if you spend your life thinking about it, but I'm not seeing what the interesting relationship is between those two things.

Honestly just look at their homepage: https://postgresml.org. I'm usually the first to criticize products for using buzzwords and making it very unclear what they do, but of all the AI products I've seen their homepage has to be one the clearest pages I've encounter in the space.

The example there makes it immediately obvious what it does and I won't repeat it here. If it's not clear to you probably you are not the target market.

I already told you I don't want to talk about this here and now. It is not dumb but it is disrespectful to demand explanations from strangers, like I have time for this.

> Well it's there in the name, they add machine learning to Postgres

But they are not a publicly traded company so adding a keyword won't do much for the stock. It must be something more.

> It must be something more.

Yes, it must be an actual tech to run ML workloads inside the Postgres instance, where all the data is readily available.

stock prices are proxy for perception of company. that perception matters in different ways for those that don't have a ticker (founder prestige, fundraising, hiring, etc)

Really? I don't know if you wanted to really want to understand what it is or you are from the cult of anti AI.

This is just announcement for the fundraising. See its landing page for what it actually does. It has full code examples in the main section, which makes it very clear. It has many more examples throughout the landing page. Also the docs seems to be of quite good quality.

> Really? I don't know if you wanted to really want to understand what it is or you are from the cult of anti AI.

I don't think he's in the cult of anti AI, although with headlines like this one, which I myself don't fully get, I can see how that "cult" will grow over time. If you're working on amazing AI projects, please make sure you are not just throwing marketing buzzwords around, make sure people understand what the purpose of your work is, what it solves or what it can be used to solve, then say "using AI space interconnected elector" or whatever its actually using to solve those problems.

There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of specific AI applications and even opposed to the progression of the technology in general. Grouping all of those together as a single cult is reductive, adversarial and defensive, I'm not sure why you'd do it in good faith.

Something I think about often is that people who study cults don't use the word cult to describe them. It's too broad, dismissive, and negatively associated to be useful for actual curious work. Anyway.

Are any of these reasons substantial here?

Thus flows the money of venturous capital

I too found their website lacking. I understand most of the terms, but I don’t understand “why Postgres”

It feels like a mismatch to me

I know! I actually thought it was a joke website at first. Like… the onion for a series round.

What are the relative strengths and weaknesses of PostgresML vs MindsDB?

Full disclaimer, I work on PostgresML, and I'm not a MindsDB expert.

They both do ML in the database, but we've been at least as focused on scalability for Postgres workloads as ML functionality, with our PgCat project. It's a pooler that gives us load balancing, sharding, failover etc to handle large clusters of many machines for application and inference workloads to scale horizontally.

OTOH MindsDB interconnects with just about every data source out there, which you may consider an advantage.

i did an interview with Montana from PostgresML a couple months ago, which maybe offers a bit more context on what they're doing! https://youtu.be/j8hE8-jZJGU

Is PostgresML an .org or a .com that talks a good open source talk?

I don't know if this will bite me in the long run but I'm learning to accept that I am at a particular level and others are attaining higher levels.

I will learn and grow and that's fine.

But at some point I have to accept ballpark limitations.

If I read a promotion for a product and I can't tell what it does - I'm not going to do homework to find out what it means. I'll just accept that this product is for people who have ascended to a higher level of existence.

I'm sure if I get to a point where I need a product like this - I'll write the correct google search and this will pop up.

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