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0Welcome to Innovator Coffee, an English podcast dedicated to bridging the gap between people and the world of AI and innovation. Follow us to explore the top AI products, ecosystem insights and the emerging trends.
In this episode, we interview with Xiaofan Luan, VP of Technology at Zilliz, a company specializing in vector databases, and discusses the history, technology, and market position of this infrastructure in the context of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The conversation primarily focuses on how vector databases, such as the open-source Milvus project, address challenges like processing unstructured data and enabling large-scale similarity searches. A significant portion of the discussion is dedicated to the role of vector databases in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, which use them to reduce the hallucination of Large Language Models (LLMs) by providing a single source of truth. The founder also highlights the ongoing industry challenges of scalability and cost reduction, while detailing Zilliz's cloud-only business model and global expansion strategy.
00:00 – Welcome to Innovator Coffee Bridging people with the world of AI and innovation; guest introduction.
00:45 – The Birth of Vector Databases Why vectors became the next data representation and how the market emerged.
03:42 – Vector Databases in the RAG & Agent Era Multimodal AI, hallucination reduction, RAG systems, and agent memory.
07:33 – Industry Landscape & Key Players FAISS, Pinecone, open source ecosystems, and a fast-diversifying market.
10:25 – Core Challenges: Cost, Accuracy, Scale Why cost is the biggest bottleneck and what unlocks the next wave of use cases.
15:43 – Founder Story & Strategic Pivots From GPU databases to vectors: finding real product–market fit.
19:28 – Product Differentiation & Enterprise Adoption Scalability, cloud-native design, security, governance, and cost efficiency.
29:00 – Global Expansion & The Future of AI Infrastructure
Enterprise use cases, US vs. APAC markets, open source GTM, and what comes after scaling laws.
Special thanks to Hannah Wang who did the wonderful job to assist to complete this podcast. www.linkedin.com
and Vicky who helps editing the podcast vickylan0004@gmail.com
Hosts:
Tom Kong
*Stanford EE alumni,
*Founder@ Stanford AGI Adventist Community (10K+ members so far from top VC, Engineers, startups from Silicon Valley )
*AI Lecturer, a serial entrepreneur in media and data. Advisor @ techtimes.com
*AI deployment for 8 years, with NLP and recent LLMs (RAG, Agent, Diffusion)
Wickey Wang
*IT Security Compliance Leader & University Faculty
*Growth fund VC advisor, VC fellow and Angel Investor with cybersecurity and AI focus
*GAI Security book co-author
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