You can think of Shaped more like a vector store + feature store + ML inference combined into one service. This bundling is what makes it so easy to get state-of-the art real-time recommendations and search performance.

E.g imagine trying to build a feed with pgvector, you need to build all of the vector encoding logic for your catalog, then you need to build user embeddings, the models to represent that and then have a service that at query time encodes user embeddings from interactions does a lookup on pgvector and returns nearest neighbor items. Then you also need to think about fine-tuning reranking models, diversity algorithms and the cold-start problem of serving new items to users. Shaped and ShapedQL bundles all of that logic into a service that does it all as one in a low-latency and fault-tolerant way.