Weaviate 1.18 has been released with new features, performance improvements, and fixes. Key updates include faster filtering using Roaring Bitmaps, improved HNSW-PQ for better performance at lower RAM requirements, enhancements to BM25 and Hybrid Search, replication features like tunable consistency and repair-on-read, a Cursor API for systematic object retrieval, and an Azure Storage backup module. These updates aim to improve the scalability, speed, and reliability of Weaviate as a vector database.