Building Marco: The Journey of Developing a Vector Search Engine

Jesse Clark (@jn2clark) is a co-founder of Marqo, the end-to-end, multimodal vector search engine. Vector search has exploded along with the rise of generative AI models, so Marqo’s arrival has had excellent timing. The project has quickly grown to almost 3000 GitHub stars, despite being less than a year old. Jesse and his team weren’t exactly expecting this level of immediate success, but they are well-positioned to continue developing Marqo as a fixture in the worlds of information retrieval and machine learning. 

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In this episode we discuss:

• Jesse’s journey from physics research, to Stitch Fix, Amazon, and finally starting Marqo

• Industry vs academia in the cutting edge of machine learning

• Why “almost any organization in the world would benefit from Marqo”

• Talking about machine learning language - tensors, vectors, embeddings

• How Jesse deals with the stress of knowing how fast the AI space is innovating

Links:

• Marqo

People mentioned:

• Katrina Lake (@kmlake)

• Eric Colson (@ericcolson)