MARK MIRCHANDANI: I'm here with Bob from SeMI
and today we're talking all about knowledge graphs.
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How do they actually get the, well, Weaviate set up?
BOB VAN LUIJT: Yeah, so there are
two ways how you can do that.
So one is if you want to try it out or play around with it,
we have Docker containers available,
so you can run it even on your local machine.
But if you want to scale it to--
for big use cases, we have Helm Charts and Kubernetes classes
ready that you can just--
with the push of a button, you can run it out of the box.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: So let's talk about the first case,
where they just have a Docker container.
BOB VAN LUIJT: Yeah.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: How is it available to them,
and then what should they do with it?
BOB VAN LUIJT: One of the things that we
do is that we have the machinery model.
So that is pre-trained.
That lives on Docker Hub.
Also Weaviate itself lives on Docker Hub.
So you just literally run a Docker Compose app,
and you get everything, and then you start running it.
There's really nothing more that you have to do.
And a question that I get lots--
people ask me, like, yeah, but where do I need to train it?
And the answer is, you don't.
We'll make sure that's all happening for you.
We train it on there.
We train it on Google Cloud.
We deploy it to Docker Hub.
That's it.
It's just you click Docker Compose app,
take a sip of coffee, and you're good to go.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: So all of that made available to them?
BOB VAN LUIJT: Yes.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: But then the second model
is you're kind of hosting that for them, right?
BOB VAN LUIJT: Yes, that is correct.
So we also host it for them.
Which, to be honest, under the hood,
it's pretty much the same thing.
So it really depends on what people want.
So they can use the open source version,
do everything themselves.
They can use the hosted version, where we host it for them.
Or, we have a model where we say we
help you set it up on, for example, Google Cloud
and run it for you.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: So when it comes for you to actually build
that software, how do you create it such
that it's available for everybody?
BOB VAN LUIJT: Yeah, so there are actually
three answers to that.
So, first, we have, of course, the model.
So what we do is we created a pipeline that
trains the model in separate languages.
So Weaviate comes in eight languages.
What we do, it starts on GitHub, where the source code lives.
And when we make changes, or when
we want to create a new model-- because, of course, the data
that we're getting in is also-- for example,
Wikipedia is also constantly growing.
We push that to Google Cloud.
We train on CPUs.
That has to do with the type of model that we're using.
In seconds, we spin up this tremendously huge machine.
I think we're talking many dozens of CPUs.
We're talking about, I think, 800 gigs of memory.
And it starts to pull in all the data
sources, hundreds of gigabytes of source material.
It does the preprocessing, it does the training.
It compresses all of that into, I think, in between 1 and 1/2
and 2 gigabytes of a model, pushes it to Docker Hub,
shuts everything down, and we're done.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: How would you say Google Cloud has
helped you build that?
BOB VAN LUIJT: So there are two answers to that.
So, first is more the-- on a high level.
Building this five years ago, maybe--
I mean, especially 10 years ago--
maybe even five years ago would've been impossible.
I mean, it's just impossible to do it.
So these dozens of CPUs, that amount of memory--
it would simply be impossible.
So we are a small company.
We're a startup, and we can just build this.
And not even just once-- we can do it every month.
So the fact that these tools are available to us
just at the click of a button or a command in the command
line, that is fantastic.
More practically, that is the way
how Google Cloud has organized the infrastructure.
So we use the APIs and G Cloud a lot.
So.
In batch scripts, we use G Cloud.
And in other situations, we use the API ecosystem.
It's just-- it's very straightforward and very easy
to use.
It's very easy to debug, to understand what's going well,
what's going wrong, releases of underlying technologies
like operating systems-- that just comes all out of the box.
So it's just-- if I just tried to think how we would have--
should have done this five or 10 years ago, that's just--
that's impossible, I think.
So that's how it helps us.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: We talked earlier about
how people can use Weaviate.
They can use the hosted model or they can set it up.
BOB VAN LUIJT: Yeah.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: What were the next steps for people
who are really interested in learning more about Weaviate.
BOB VAN LUIJT: So they can go to our website.
That would by be SeMI.technology.
Then they can find the documentation button,
and that's basically where they can get started.
We are represented on all platforms--
Stack Overflow, GitHub, Twitter--
well, anything that you can think about.
So-- and if people have questions or want to engage,
then I'm looking forward to meeting them.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: Well, it's really exciting
to hear about this space.
So thank you very much for coming in, Bob.
BOB VAN LUIJT: Thank you.
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