The "Do you need a Dedicated Vector Database?" slide is quite interesting, but doesn't really answer its own question! This is something I've been wondering myself, if anyone has any guidelines or rules of thumb I would appreciate it.

I've recently been using Simon Willison's (hi simonw) excellent `llm` tool that can help with embeddings, and it takes the simplest approach possible: just store embeddings in SQLite with a few UDFs for calculating distance etc.

The simplicity of that approach is very appealing, but presumably at some level of traffic+data an application will outgrow it and need a more specialized database. Does anyone have a good intuition for where that cutoff might be?