Chroma now has a fully-distributed and serverless version backed by object-storage (also Apache 2.0).
More on why and how we built this here:
https://www.trychroma.com/engineering/serverless
AMA about AI, retrieval, systems, Rust, and more.
Many buzzwords used and after reading your project page, I requested the help of ChatGPT to make any sense out of it!
Is what Chatgpt tells me about your interesting project right?
This is what it has to say:
Chroma's serverless system is designed to help developers build AI applications without managing servers. It allows you to efficiently store and retrieve data using vectors (for AI models) and text queries, all without needing to handle infrastructure. The system is scalable, cost-effective, and optimized for AI workloads, so developers can focus on their projects rather than backend management.
Yes - that's a great explanation.
Is this (or will it be) part of the oss version of chroma? And would it work with the embedded version of chroma? From the article, it looks like it might require more server-side components now vs chromadb today
a distributed database is naturally has more complexity, but we’ve put a lot of effort in to make it as easy as possible to run.
Relatedly ColPali (https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01449) is gaining a ton of steam in the IR community.
In general we are skeptical of silver bullets in retrieval.