From shiny object to sober actuality: The vector database story, two years later

Once I first wrote “Vector databases: Shiny object syndrome and the case of a lacking unicorn” in March 2024, the business was awash in hype. Vector databases have been positioned because the subsequent massive factor — essential infrastructure layer for the gen AI period. Billions of enterprise {dollars} flowed, builders rushed to combine embeddings into their pipelines and analysts breathlessly tracked funding rounds for Pinecone, Weaviate, Chroma, Milvus and a dozen others.

The promise was intoxicating: Lastly, a technique to search by that means slightly than by brittle key phrases. Simply dump your enterprise information right into a vector retailer, join an LLM and watch magic occur.

Besides the magic by no means totally materialized.

Two years on, the actuality examine has arrived: 95% of organizations invested in gen AI initiatives are seeing zero measurable returns. And, most of the warnings I raised again then — concerning the limits of vectors, the crowded vendor panorama and the dangers of treating vector databases as silver bullets — have performed out nearly precisely as predicted.

Prediction 1: The lacking unicorn

Again then, I questioned whether or not Pinecone — the poster little one of the class — would obtain unicorn standing or whether or not it might develop into the “lacking unicorn” of the database world. Immediately, that query has been answered in probably the most telling approach attainable: Pinecone is reportedly exploring a sale, struggling to interrupt out amid fierce competitors and buyer churn.

Sure, Pinecone raised massive rounds and signed marquee logos. However in follow, differentiation was skinny. Open-source gamers like Milvus, Qdrant and Chroma undercut them on price. Incumbents like Postgres (with pgVector) and Elasticsearch merely added vector assist as a characteristic. And prospects more and more requested: “Why introduce an entire new database when my present stack already does vectors properly sufficient?”

The outcome: Pinecone, as soon as valued close to a billion {dollars}, is now on the lookout for a house. The lacking unicorn certainly. In September 2025, Pinecone appointed Ash Ashutosh as CEO, with founder Edo Liberty shifting to a chief scientist function.  The timing is telling: The management change comes amid growing stress and questions over its long-term independence.  

Prediction 2: Vectors alone gained’t minimize it

I additionally argued that vector databases by themselves weren’t an finish answer. In case your use case required exactness — l ike trying to find “Error 221” in a guide—a pure vector search would gleefully serve up “Error 222” as “shut sufficient.” Cute in a demo, catastrophic in manufacturing.

That rigidity between similarity and relevance has confirmed deadly to the parable of vector databases as all-purpose engines. 

“Enterprises found the exhausting approach that semantic ≠ right.”

Builders who gleefully swapped out lexical seek for vectors shortly reintroduced… lexical search together with vectors. Groups that anticipated vectors to “simply work” ended up bolting on metadata filtering, rerankers and hand-tuned guidelines. By 2025, the consensus is evident: Vectors are highly effective, however solely as a part of a hybrid stack.

Prediction 3: A crowded subject turns into commoditized

The explosion of vector database startups was by no means sustainable. Weaviate, Milvus (through Zilliz), Chroma, Vespa, Qdrant — every claimed refined differentiators, however to most consumers all of them did the identical factor: retailer vectors and retrieve nearest neighbors.

Immediately, only a few of those gamers are breaking out. The market has fragmented, commoditized and in some ways been swallowed by incumbents. Vector search is now a checkbox characteristic in cloud knowledge platforms, not a standalone moat.

Simply as I wrote then: Distinguishing one vector DB from one other will pose an growing problem. That problem has solely grown more durable. Vald, Marqo, LanceDB, PostgresSQL, MySQL HeatWave, Oracle 23c, Azure SQL, Cassandra, Redis, Neo4j, SingleStore, ElasticSearch, OpenSearch, Apahce Solr… the listing goes on.

The brand new actuality: Hybrid and GraphRAG

However this isn’t only a story of decline — it’s a narrative of evolution. Out of the ashes of vector hype, new paradigms are rising that mix the most effective of a number of approaches.

Hybrid Search: Key phrase + vector is now the default for critical purposes. Corporations discovered that you simply want each precision and fuzziness, exactness and semantics. Instruments like Apache Solr, Elasticsearch, pgVector and Pinecone’s personal “cascading retrieval” embrace this.

GraphRAG: The most popular buzzword of late 2024/2025 is GraphRAG — graph-enhanced retrieval augmented era. By marrying vectors with information graphs, GraphRAG encodes the relationships between entities that embeddings alone flatten away. The payoff is dramatic.

Benchmarks and proof

• Amazon’s AI weblog cites benchmarks from Lettria, the place hybrid GraphRAG boosted reply correctness from ~50% to 80%-plus in take a look at datasets throughout finance, healthcare, business, and legislation.  

• The GraphRAG-Bench benchmark (launched Could 2025) supplies a rigorous analysis of GraphRAG vs. vanilla RAG throughout reasoning duties, multi-hop queries and area challenges.  

• An OpenReview analysis of RAG vs GraphRAG discovered that every method has strengths relying on activity — however hybrid mixtures typically carry out finest.  

• FalkorDB’s weblog experiences that when schema precision issues (structured domains), GraphRAG can outperform vector retrieval by an element of ~3.4x on sure benchmarks.  

The rise of GraphRAG underscores the bigger level: Retrieval is just not about any single shiny object. It’s about constructing retrieval programs — layered, hybrid, context-aware pipelines that give LLMs the best data, with the best precision, on the proper time.

What this implies going ahead

The decision is in: Vector databases have been by no means the miracle. They have been a step — an vital one — within the evolution of search and retrieval. However they don’t seem to be, and by no means have been, the endgame.

The winners on this house gained’t be those that promote vectors as a standalone database. They would be the ones who embed vector search into broader ecosystems — integrating graphs, metadata, guidelines and context engineering into cohesive platforms.

In different phrases: The unicorn isn’t the vector database. The unicorn is the retrieval stack.

Trying forward: What’s subsequent

• Unified knowledge platforms will subsume vector + graph: Anticipate main DB and cloud distributors to supply built-in retrieval stacks (vector + graph + full-text) as built-in capabilities.

• “Retrieval engineering” will emerge as a definite self-discipline: Simply as MLOps matured, so too will practices round embedding tuning, hybrid rating and graph building.

• Meta-models studying to question higher: Future LLMs could study to orchestrate which retrieval methodology to make use of per question, dynamically adjusting weighting.

• Temporal and multimodal GraphRAG: Already, researchers are extending GraphRAG to be time-aware (T-GRAG) and multimodally unified (e.g. connecting photos, textual content, video).

• Open benchmarks and abstraction layers: Instruments like BenchmarkQED (for RAG benchmarking) and GraphRAG-Bench will push the group towards fairer, comparably measured programs.

From shiny objects to important infrastructure

The arc of the vector database story has adopted a traditional path: A pervasive hype cycle, adopted by introspection, correction and maturation. In 2025, vector search is now not the shiny object everybody pursues blindly — it’s now a essential constructing block inside a extra refined, multi-pronged retrieval structure.

The unique warnings have been proper. Pure vector-based hopes typically crash on the shoals of precision, relational complexity and enterprise constraints. But the expertise was by no means wasted: It pressured the business to rethink retrieval, mixing semantic, lexical and relational methods.

If I have been to jot down a sequel in 2027, I believe it might body vector databases not as unicorns, however as legacy infrastructure — foundational, however eclipsed by smarter orchestration layers, adaptive retrieval controllers and AI programs that dynamically select which retrieval software suits the question.

As of now, the actual battle is just not vector vs key phrase — it’s the indirection, mixing and self-discipline in constructing retrieval pipelines that reliably floor gen AI in info and area information. That’s the unicorn we must be chasing now.

Amit Verma is head of engineering and AI Labs at Neuron7.

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