Pinecone, a vector database startup founded by Edo Liberty, former head of Amazon AI Labs, has long been at the forefront of helping companies power large-scale language models (LLMs) with their own data. But most recently, the company completely redesigned its product and launched Pinecone Serverless. This eliminates the need for customers to worry about managing and scaling their deployments. Currently, Pinecone Serverless has completed its beta phase and has been officially released.
Liberty notes that the company's early customers are now shifting from generative AI experiments to wanting to launch their own AI products. The company has watched companies grapple with the complexities of building new applications while figuring out the best way to get them into production.
“The first wave of production-grade applications will hit the market now and in the next six to nine months. What our 5,000+ customers have told us loud and clear is that we need dedicated, optimized, specialized tools that are very good at performing vector searches, performing RAGs, extracting knowledge, and creating context for these language models. What they were really saying was, I need scale and performance and I need cost to be able to reason about the product I’m building.”
Liberty emphasized that Pinecone has invested a lot of time preparing the product for production deployment. At the same time, prices have become much cheaper. The company actually believes that customers using Pinecone Serverless can reduce costs by up to 50x. In part, that's because the team redesigned the system as a multi-tenant service that separates storage and compute. This allows Pinecone's customers to only pay when they actually consume CPU time, and the company adjusts capacity on the backend.
“Because we run everything as a service, our ability to orchestrate everything allows us to only bill people for what they use. This is incredibly rare and incredibly difficult,” Liberty said.
During the public preview, Pinecone's customers also requested a variety of additional features. One of them is Private Endpoints, which is launching in public preview today. This allows businesses to connect directly to Amazon's virtual private cloud through AWS PrivateLink. This ensures that your data is not exposed to the public internet and remains well within the various governance and compliance regimes your company may be required to 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, Notion co-founder and COO. “The launch of our first AI capabilities was made possible thanks to Pinecone Serverless. Their technology allows our Q&A AI to provide instant answers to millions of users pulled from billions of documents. Most importantly, moving to a modern architecture has reduced costs by 60% and advanced our mission to make software tool creation ubiquitous.”