The harness is mostly retrieval
Laurie Voss says applied-AI iteration has moved off the model and into "the harness". He’s right - and once you strip the new vocabulary, the harness is mostly a retrieval system.
Software developer and search engineer.
I’m Chris — a software developer based in London. I’m currently Director of Engineering at Vimeo, leading the teams behind the platform that powers millions of videos. This is my personal blog, where I write about programming, search systems, and Elasticsearch.
xAI algorithm through a search lens
xAI open-sourced the For You feed algorithm today. Three observations through a search-and-IR lens: two-tower’s quiet dominance, the retrieve/rank split surviving the bitter lesson, and recsys converging with search.
Could TurboQuant Unlock Late Interaction Retrieval?
TurboQuant landed as a KV cache result, but the more interesting application might be ColBERT-style late interaction. Here’s the case, and the open questions.
What to make of TurboQuant
A new quantisation method out of Google Research is making the rounds. Qdrant shipped it. Elastic ran the benchmarks and politely declined. Both responses tell you something useful.
The pattern goes all the way down
DiskBBQ’s new filtered-search optimisation is the same architectural move I wrote about last week, applied one layer deeper. The pattern is fractal - and that’s what makes it useful.
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