Pinecone, a vector database startup founded by Ed Liberty, former head of Amazon's AI Lab, has been at the forefront of helping companies extend large-scale language models (LLMs) with their own data. I did. But just recently, the company completely redesigned its product and launched Pinecone Serverless, which frees customers from having to think about managing and scaling their deployments. Today, Pinecone Serverless is released from beta and generally available.
Liberty notes that the company's early customers are now moving from experimenting with generative AI to wanting to launch their own AI products. The company observed companies grappling with the complexity of building new applications while figuring out how best to bring them into production.
“The first wave of production-grade applications are coming to market now and in the next 6-9 months. What they were actually saying was, “We need scale, and we need specialized tools that are very good at extracting knowledge and generating context for these language models.'' We need performance, and we need a cost that makes sense for the product we're building.'' ”
Image credit: Pinecone
Liberty emphasized that Pinecone has spent a lot of time getting the product ready for production, while at the same time getting the price significantly lower. In fact, the company believes customers using Pinecone Serverless can reduce costs by up to 50x. One of the reasons, he said, is that the team redesigned the system to be a multi-tenant service that separates storage and compute. This allows Pinecone's customer to pay only when he actually consumes his CPU time, and the company adjusts the capacity on the backend.
“Because we run everything as a service, our ability to orchestrate everything means we can only charge users for what they use, and no more. It's very difficult,” Liberty said.
Pinecone founder Ed Liberty;Image credit: Pinecone
During the public preview, Pinecone customers also requested several additional capabilities, one of which, launching in public preview today, is Private Endpoints, which allow companies to connect directly to their virtual private clouds on Amazon via AWS PrivateLink, ensuring that data is never exposed to the public internet and remains within the various governance and compliance regimes that companies must adhere to.
Companies already using Pinecone Serverless include Gong, Help Scout, New Relic, Notion, TaskUS, and You.com.
“Notion is leading the AI productivity revolution,” said Akshay Kothari, co-founder and COO of Notion. “The launch of our first-to-market AI capabilities was made possible by Pinecone Serverless. Their technology allows our Q&A AI to instantly answer millions of users based on billions of documents. Best of all, our move to a modern architecture reduces costs by 60% and advances our mission to make software tool creation ubiquitous.”