Jiang Chen: Why I Joined Zilliz

Over the past decade, the author has specialized in various aspects of data infrastructure, including access control, data privacy, NoSQL databases, and web-scale data indexing. In recent years, big data emerged as a significant innovation with technologies like MapReduce, distributed computing, and structured data storage leading the way. However, the AI era requires different technology stacks, especially with the growing popularity of Large Language Models. Embedding and vector stores are at the center of this stage, which is also the focus of Zilliz. The author's experience includes working on search indexing at Google, where they built ultra-flexible infrastructures to understand billions of images and videos on the public web. They believe that AI-native infrastructure holds the key to the future of business and are enthusiastic about democratizing this highly complex infrastructure for resource-limited startups. The author joined Zilliz due to its ambitious mission, exceptional team, and challenging work environment. At Zilliz, they build a suite of tooling and services that ease the information retrieval process on unstructured data, including Towhee, Akcio, and a vector database for efficient storage and search of vector embeddings.