The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Enhancing Search and Recommendation Systems with Vector Databases with Bob van Luijt of Weaviate

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

In this bonus conversation, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Bob van Luijt of Weaviate.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel, where we replay a snippet from the show we just recorded. Kostas, are you ready to give people a sneak peek? I am, of course. Let's do it. Let's do it. Kostas, I think one of the things that is, I actually, my takeaway is in many ways a question for you. We've had some really prestigious academic personas on the show who have done really significant things.

And I think about the Materialize team. And I mean, there's just some people who have done some really cool things. And what was interesting about Bob is that, I mean, he studied music, number one, but he also drew a lot of influence from academia, but he's self-taught. And he's building a vector database and dealing with embeddings, which is really interesting to me. And so I guess my takeaway question for you is, how do you think about that? Because you, of course, studied a lot of complex engineering stuff in school. But it's amazing to me that he can sort of study music and apply some of those concepts to very deep engineering concepts and mathematical concepts to produce an actual product without formal training. I mean,

that's pretty amazing. So I don't know. I'm thinking about that, but I think you're the best person to help me understand that. Yeah, I think if you ask me, we probably need more people from music into taken business. I don't find it that strange that

music studies helped him so much because at the core of,'s say music itself there's creativity right like people who play let's say like an instrument or they go and like try to even like have a career or all that they have like a very strong need to be to express and create they are creators right i think like the definition of a creator right and it's a definition of a creator who is i'll say that like it's like a mental creation right like music always comes out of like

something that it's in your mind right yeah so i think like there there are many similarities with even going and writing code at the end, right? You start from something very abstract, something that can't be represented with math or whatever, right? That's also true for music. But at the same time, and that's something that we talked with him, is that he learned a lot of things about business, right? Because music is, if you want to survive in there, like, as an industry, it's brutal. Like, you have to expose yourself. Like, it's the definition of, like, exposing yourself

and getting rejected, right? So I think that there are, like, many lessons from, let's say, like, the people where there are, like, many similarities in a way, but with, for instance, let's say, platform, it's not like a keyboard and writing code. It's like an instrument, but at the end it has like a lot to do. They have like things in common that are very important of like creativity. And also being able to create something completely new and take it out there,

like convince people that like there's value in that, right. So that's one thing. The other thing is that okay. He's like, I'm amazingly good at like expressing himself and some very deep and complex let's say concepts, which I think is like very important for anything that has to do with all this craziness around AI. And that's like one of the reasons that I would ask anyone to go and listen to him, because I think they are going to feel much more confident around AI as a technology and how it actually has substance and value and we found also like some very interesting conversations about businesses right new business categories like new product categories that they are out there so please listen to him and I hope that we are going to

have him back again and talk more about that because we can spend hours with him for sure. I agree. Well, if you're interested in vector databases, embeddings, or sort of database history in general, listen to the show. Subscribe if you haven't. Tell a friend. And of course, we will catch you on the next one.