I get this question frequently - why not use FAISS or ANNOY directly, instead of a vector database, so glad to see this aspect covered in this article.

Plug: If you're ever looking for an open source alternative to Pinecone, we recently added vector search to Typesense: https://typesense.org/docs/0.24.1/api/vector-search.html

The key thing is that it's in-memory and allows you to combine attribute-based filtering, together with HNSW-based nearest-neighbor search.

We're also working on a way to automatically generate embeddings from within Typesense using any ML models of your choice.

So Algolia + Pinecone + Open Source + Self-Hostable with a cloud hosted option = Typesense