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Show HN: TurboQuant-WASM โ€“ Google's vector quantization in the browser

130 points - yesterday at 2:53 PM

Source
  • netdur

    yesterday at 10:27 PM

    I tried TQ for vector search and my findings is not good, it is not worth it if you cannot use GPU, however I got same quality of search as 32f using 8bit quant

    I wrote ann ext for sqlite, using tq, I do save a lot on space but 32f is still faster despite everything I have tried

    code here https://github.com/netdur/munind/tree/main/src/tq

      • teamchong

        today at 12:16 AM

        youโ€™re right that 32f is faster on raw query time, quantization adds extra step. main benefit on download size since gzip wonโ€™t help much, which matters most in browser contexts

    • glohbalrob

      yesterday at 4:52 PM

      Very cool. I added the new multi embedding 2 model to my site the other week from google

      I guess need to dig into this and see if itโ€™s faster and has more use cases! Thanks for publishing your work

      • hhthrowaway1230

        yesterday at 4:43 PM

        Awesome! Also love the gaussian splat demo, cool use case!

        • refulgentis

          yesterday at 10:21 PM

          Sloppiest slop I've seen in a couple weeks:

          - fork of a fork of a quantization technique

          - Only contribution is...compiling JS to WASM by default?

          - suspicious burst of ~nothing comments from new accounts

          - 6 comments 7 hours in, 4 flagged/dead, other 2 also spammy, confused and making category errors at best, at worst, more spam.

          - Demo shows it's worse: 800 ms instead of 2.6 ms for text embedding search

          - "but it saves space" - yes! 1.2 MB in RAM instead of 7.2 MB to turn search into 1s on a MacBook Pro M4 Max, instead of sub-frame duration.

          - It's not even wrong to do this with the output embeddings, there's way more obvious ways to save space that donโ€™t affect retrieval time this much

          • himmelsee2018

            yesterday at 7:30 PM

            [flagged]

            • newbrowseruser

              yesterday at 4:49 PM

              [dead]

              • bingbong06

                yesterday at 4:49 PM

                [flagged]

                • aritzdf

                  yesterday at 7:06 PM

                  [flagged]