Introduction
Pinecone, a vector database startup founded by Edo Liberty, the former head of Amazon’s AI Labs, has been at the forefront of helping businesses augment large language models (LLMs) with their own data. Recently, Pinecone rearchitected its product to launch Pinecone Serverless, freeing customers from managing deployments and scaling them. Today, Pinecone serverless comes out of beta and is now generally available.
The Need for a Dedicated Tool
Liberty notes that the company’s early customers are transitioning from experimenting with generative AI to wanting to launch their own AI products. Enterprises are grappling with the complexity of building new applications while figuring out how to put them into production. "What our more than 5,000 customers told us loud and clear is that they need a dedicated, optimized, specialized tool that is extremely good at doing vector search, doing RAG, extracting knowledge, and generating context for these language models," Liberty said.
The Complexity of Building AI Products
Liberty stressed that Pinecone spent a lot of time making the product ready for production deployments while making it significantly more affordable. The company actually believes that customers who use Pinecone serverless can reduce their cost up to 50x, in part because the team rearchitected the system to be a multi-tenant service that decouples storage and compute. With this architecture, Pinecone’s customers only pay when they actually consume CPU time, with the company orchestrating the capacity in the backend.
The Benefits of Pinecone Serverless
Because Pinecone runs everything as a service, its ability to orchestrate all of that makes it able to charge people for exactly what they use — and not anything more. This is incredibly rare and incredibly hard to do. As Liberty noted, "That’s why we’re so confident in our ability to provide a cost-effective solution for businesses using Pinecone serverless."
Private Endpoints: Ensuring Data Security
During the public preview, Pinecone’s customers also asked for a number of additional features. One of these is Private Endpoints, which is launching in public preview today. This allows enterprises to create a direct connection to their virtual private clouds on Amazon via AWS PrivateLink, ensuring that data stays well within the various governance and compliance regimes a company may have to adhere to.
Customer Success Stories
Some of the companies already using Pinecone serverless include Gong, Help Scout, New Relic, Notion, TaskUS, and You.com. "Notion is leading the AI productivity revolution," said Notion co-founder and COO Akshay Kothari. "Our launch of a first-to-market AI feature was made possible by Pinecone serverless. Their technology enables our Q&A AI to deliver instant answers to millions of users, sourced from billions of documents. Best of all, our move to their latest architecture has cut our costs by 60%, advancing our mission to make software toolmaking ubiquitous."
Conclusion
Pinecone serverless is a game-changer for businesses looking to use large language models in production. With its ability to reduce costs up to 50x and provide a dedicated, optimized tool for vector search, RAG, extracting knowledge, and generating context, Pinecone serverless is the perfect solution for enterprises looking to launch their own AI products.
About Pinecone
Pinecone is a vector database startup founded by Edo Liberty. The company provides a platform for businesses to augment large language models with their own data. With its rearchitected product, Pinecone Serverless, customers can now use the platform without worrying about managing deployments and scaling them.
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