"Vector databases are dead".
And yet one of the most interesting infra companies in the world right now... is a vector database.
I reviewed 20 expert calls on @turbopuffer + all public data on the company. Co was founded in Ottawa in Oct 2023 by @Sirupsen (ex-Shopify). Here is what we know:
- $1m to $100m run-rate in 19 months
- profitable the entire way
- <$1m of outside capital raised (!) to date
- <40 people, no sales team
- customers: @cursor_ai, @AnthropicAI, @NotionHQ, @Atlassian, @linear, @harvey, @tryramp...
So what does Turbopuffer do? Well, every AI model needs a "find what's relevant" step before it can answer (could be your codebase in Cursor, your workspace in Notion...). Turbopuffer is that search layer, and it is rented as an API. It combines both classic keyword search (exact text hits) and vector search (search by meaning. Basically so that "cancel subscription" also returns "stop billing" topics).
Great, but why does it win? Mostly one architectural bet. Everyone else kept data in RAM (~$3,600 per TB p.m.). Turbopuffer keeps it on S3 (~$20 per TB) with an SSD cache on top (~$70 per TB all-in). The one drawback is accepting a slower first query, but it runs 10-100x cheaper at scale.
The calls and references are the most one-sided I have ever read on any infra company: Of the 20 calls, 13 were current customers across 9 orgs. Zero churn. Implied NPS ~ +70 (6 of 8 scores were 9s or 10s)
- A leading productivity company migrated 10bn+ vectors off Pinecone
- A large collaboration software company ran a formal RFP against Pinecone, Qdrant, Weaviate and LanceDB. Turbopuffer won, and now carries ~75% of their semantic search traffic in the EU
- A fast-growing AI support platform: identical workload quoted at 5x+ price on Pinecone. They went as far as saying that even if Turbopuffer doubled their pricing tomorrow, they wouldn't blink
- A large Canadian telco (2 yrs in prod): "we've never been paged, infra has never gone down"... and went from a cost projection of millions to thousands
- A leading AI talent marketplace deprecated Pinecone entirely; on their new workload Turbopuffer came in 50-100x cheaper than Mongo, and they said it is one of the few products developers would cry over if taken out
And the best line of all, from one of the experts: "if turbopuffer didn't exist, I don't think Cursor could have existed as a product"
Agentic AI is also a tailwind, not the threat people assumed: agents perform 25-50x more queries than human users. And agent loops are inference-bound so they tolerate retrieval latency ==> that's exactly the trade-off Turbopuffer makes.
There is one open question here: AWS basically already copied the architecture natively (S3 Vectors, with claims of it being "90% cheaper"). That direct threat was flagged 5 times in my 20 calls reviewed.
And that's actually super cool... Turbopuffer's answer is clear: keep cutting prices faster than anyone can chase (Elon's playbook on EVs with Tesla). TP has cut query prices by up to 94% since launch... and stayed profitable doing it.
And so ultimately: does compounding cost advantage + total focus beat distribution? It did once before: that is literally Snowflake vs Redshift (and my favourite horse near that race is @ClickHouseDB in the same vein, per my earlier posts)
Thoughts @HarryStebbings, @jaminball, @GavinSBaker, @andy_pavlo, @bernhardsson?
today, Vercel's Eve agents can run on agentOS
agent frameworks require a heavy sandbox with 1 GB+ of RAM to run
but most agents just read files + run simple scripts
agentOS provides a lightweight OS for these workloads
built on WebAssembly & V8
Introducing Vercel Eve ร agentOS
A secure, lightweight OS without the sandbox
๐งฌ WebAssembly & V8, not a microVM
๐ชถ Library, not infra / SaaS
๐ Mount anything as a filesystem (S3, Google Drive, โฆ)
โก ~4.8ms cold starts, 254ร cheaper to runโก
Morning. The last 48 hours of Codex and ChatGPT Work have been intense! Three important updates:
- Temporarily removing the 5 hour usage limit restriction for all Plus, Business and Pro plans
- Rolling out changes that will make GPT 5.6 Sol more efficient across the board and that will be reflected in less usage being used so that it can take you further. Exact impact to be quantified and shared
- We hit 6M active users, and are landing a usage reset in the next hour
Go do things
Claude Fable 5 will be available again globally tomorrow.
After a series of productive conversations with the US government, we're redeploying the model with a new set of classifiers to target and block more cybersecurity tasks. In the near term, some routine tasks like coding and debugging will fall back to Opus 4.8. Weโll continue to refine these classifiers over the coming weeks to reduce false positives and better distinguish genuine misuse from legitimate requests.
Weโve also begun drafting a consensus frameworkโwith Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and other Glasswing partnersโfor assessing the severity of AI jailbreaks and how AI developers should respond to them. We invite other industry partners and model providers to join us in this effort.
Finally, weโre scaling up our collaboration with the US government on model testing and safeguards. This will include pre-release access to models and safeguards for evaluation, information sharing on jailbreaks and misuse, and dedicated resources for joint research.
Thank you to our users for your patience, and to our partners across the government, industry, and the research community who worked alongside us to make Fable 5 available again.
Read our full blog: anthropic.com/news/redeployiโฆ
Secret level 6: thereโs a problem, but itโs not worth solving, so leave it alone.
This is why org with a ton of level 1s can win. They donโt get distracted by side quests
I stole this idea and now use it with every single employee.
Itโs the best illustration Iโve seen of teaching someone to be high agency.
It says there are 5 levels of work:
Level 1: โThere is a problem.โ
Level 2: โThere is a problem, and Iโve found some causes.โ
Level 3:
Seeing chatter about Fable 5 being accessible - can say categorically this is false, we are not serving any Fable / Mythos traffic
Looking into possibility of UI bug on front-end (e.g. based on historical context), but also very real chance itโs just people shitpostingโฆ
๐จ BREAKING: Anthropic is "confident that in the coming days [Fable 5] will become available again" - Anthropic's International Managing Director
we might be back
47 Followers 487 FollowingA lightweight Notion-like space for notes and files ๐๐
ใใผใใใใกใคใซใฎใใใฎใ่ปฝ้ใชNotion้ขจในใใผใน ๐๐
https://t.co/KM1r2EMPNU
712 Followers 626 FollowingFollowing market changes while enjoying the beautiful moments in life. ๐โจ
Analyzing the future rationally and embracing the present gently. ๐ฑ
333 Followers 2K FollowingI hereby declare that I will strictly comply with Twitterโs rules and policies and will refrain from any actions that could result in account suspension.