HN.zip

Turbovec – Google's TurboQuant for vector search in Rust

255 points by fittingopposite - 31 comments
nl [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I think their point is the size/performance tradeoff rather than outright performance. The point of TurboQuant is the size savings, while still giving high accuracy.

It's been a while, but I do recall some high-performing vector matching indexes being very large.

ehsanu1 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Surprised that usearch isn't in any of these, it's pretty fast.
ghm2199 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Wow! 4GB for 10 million documents. This means one could build a reverse index much faster than before and devx processes like debugging, performance testing would become much smoother. Can't wait for the sqlite bindings to come out!
ghm2199 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Also the removal latency is on a log scale. Which is quite insane.
nharada [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It would be nice to have the README be a little more human written for a project where you actually want people to adopt it
badatnames [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Anthropic employee. This is what your brain on kool aid looks like
deeviant [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Then again, if the only thing the human doing is bitching about AI use, it's not really that comparatively useful.
righthand [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Sure it is useful, the bitching is canary in the shit software mine. How do you know the software isnt shit if the Readme is shit?
bobmarleybiceps [3 hidden]5 mins ago
people should read turboquant's open review comments: https://openreview.net/forum?id=tO3ASKZlok
esafak [3 hidden]5 mins ago
tl,dr: there is an allegedly better alternative, and it's already implemented everywhere: https://github.com/VectorDB-NTU/RaBitQ-Library#rabitq-in-ind...
sp1982 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
If anyone is looking to retrofit to an existing pipeline, I use similar ideas to compress vectors for job search, getting roughly 8x compression with about a 3.5% drop in quality. My experiment: https://corvi.careers/blog/vector-search-embedding-compressi...
lmeyerov [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Interestingly, while we don't fine-tune generative models for Louie.ai, we found fine-tuning embedding models to be a major $ saver. Instead of 1K-2K wide frontier embedding vector lens... Just 64. Huge savings on vector DB $$$.

I'm curious how that works with something like turboquant. Not needed any more, still dominant, better together, ... .

anishvarghese [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This looks perfect for local, privacy first search, but since it's built in Rust, has anyone tried compiling it to WASM to run directly inside a browser extension?
westurner [3 hidden]5 mins ago
oxirs does embeddings and GraphRAG, and full text search with Tantivy; oxirs-vec, oxirs-graphrag

There's an oxirs-wasm with RDF and SPARQL bindings with a query budget. Tantivy-wasm says that the release WASM bundle is 1.5 MB.

cool-japan/oxirs: https://github.com/cool-japan/oxirs

oxirs-wasm: https://crates.io/crates/oxirs-wasm

tantivy-wasm: https://github.com/phiresky/tantivy-wasm

Is there an advantage to adding an MCP local memory interface over agent instructions on how to use a rust CLI?

And then write Markdown documents with Google OKF-like frontmatter YAML metadata for agents that work with tokens not linked data graphs; https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/knowledge-catalog/blo...

coredog64 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Can WASM use AVX512-VNNI?
LtdJorge [3 hidden]5 mins ago
No, WASM only has 128b SIMD instructions, for now.
cpursley [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Also interested.
mskkm [3 hidden]5 mins ago
There are already several openreview comments alleging academic misconduct around TurboQuant: https://openreview.net/forum?id=tO3ASKZlok

Some write-ups argue that this was deliberate rather than a good-faith mistake: https://dev.to/gaoj0017/turboquant-and-rabitq-what-the-publi...

And now this. Pretty bold AI slop.

cat-whisperer [3 hidden]5 mins ago
What's a good embedding model and search to run locally? something fast and lightweight.
beernet [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Why not just use Qdrant? They've been integrating TurboQuant for months, works well.
kanungle [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Integrated in 5 weeks and just expanded data types for turbo4 in last release. No longer need to store fp32 vectors if you don't need them
OutOfHere [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I am not convinced that Turbovec yields better retrieval than the same amount of bits of a Matryoshka embedding.
burgerboii [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Who is this co-author called t <t@t>?
cute_boi [3 hidden]5 mins ago
As it is heavily vibe coded, I think member of technical staff at antropic has no clue....

Next Prompt: remove t@t and force commit.

refulgentis [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Bloviating nonsense, 3rd time I’ve seen something like this in HN since TurboQuant came out. You don’t need float32, never did. Source: I’ve been writing on device embedding code for 4 years.
spoaceman7777 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Well. That is insane. O_O Fantastic job!
cute_boi [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Another vibe coded slop where they can't even spend time on Readme or documentation around code...
esafak [3 hidden]5 mins ago
lancedb and duckdb integrations would be great...
zuzululu [3 hidden]5 mins ago
what could i use this for as part of my agentic workflow? codebase indexing? docs ?
kyxsc [3 hidden]5 mins ago
notes/docs/wiki is a great use case