An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is a machine learning model inspired by the structure and functions of the human brain. It consists of an input layer, several hidden layers, and an output layer. The most common types of ANNs include feed forward neural networks, convolutional neural networks, and recurrent neural networks. Applications of ANNs span across various industries such as speech recognition, image recognition, text classification, forecasting, and social media analysis. While ANNs offer numerous advantages like parallel processing capability and wide applications, they also face challenges such as scalability, testing, verification, and integration into modern environments. Vector databases are crucial for managing massive embedding vectors generated by deep neural networks and other machine learning models, which can be stored in a vector database offered by Zilliz.