API/behavior changes

Describe routes and behavior changes

A new binaryQuantized embedder setting is introduced:

curl \\
  -X PATCH '<http://localhost:7700/indexes/movies/settings>' \\
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \\
  --data-binary '{
    "embedders": {
      "image2text": {
        "binaryQuantized": true 
      }
    }
  }

The binary quantization converts your embeddings of floating point numbers (using 32 bits) into embeddings of boolean values (using 1 bit). In our benchmarks, it reduced the size of the database by a factor of 10, and divided the indexing time by a factor of 6 without much impact on the search time.

[!WARNING]

Enabling this feature will update all of your vectors to contain only 1s or -1s, impacting the relevancy significantly. Once enabled, there is no coming back. Before trying it out on your main index, you should try the feature on a smaller index to ensure it fits your use case.

Although this feature degrades the relevancy of the semantic searches, it showed great results on collections with many dimensions (> 1300) and many points (more than 100000).

Telemetry

List all the new or updated telemetry

**

Name Description Example
embedders.binary_quantization_used true if the user updated the binary quantized field of the embedded settings false

Error handling