I don't think such business model is going to last. There is no reason for AI giants like OpenAI to stick with such external "vector databases". There is not much technical stuff there. Unless you want to argue that "vector searching" is just some labor work when compared to AI, in that case, sure.
There are huge segments e.g. banking, insurance,legal, which are wary of using OpenAI and they would much rather host their own LLMs. I think these vector databases will find a ready market in this segment
Tell me what makes you believe that those big techs are not going suit those "banking, insurance,legal" orgs by providing them their own LLMs? For example, ever heard about github enterprise? you pay a stupid amount, github setup everything almost identical to the public github, just on your servers for your employees. Why big techs won't do the same here?
Those high profit margin part of the LLM business is for big players only, they don't burn hundreds of billions to offer you opportunties to cut their profit by capitalizing on their core business.
Communism doesn't exist in high tech. People don't work their xxx off to pave ways for your free lunch for life.
Is the idea that big players will get tired of paying a license to a company like Qdrant and write their own database? I just don't really see why they would do that - if Qdrant is similar in complexity to any standard DB, it's like asking why doesn't Apple just rip out MySQL and write their own Apple DB.
I can see them replacing it if Qdrant isn't able to scale to their needs - thats why we ended up with Dynamo, Spanner, MyRocks. However its likely that its probably easier to just acquire the team - like Apple did with Foundation - and become project stewards than trying to invent a new datastore to save pennies.
