Data development company MongoDB has snapped up Voyage AI, bringing their specialized embedding and reranking models into the company’s data platform. This move is meant to tackle a rather sizable hitch in AI development – reducing “hallucinations” in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications.
By integrating Voyage AI’s technology, MongoDB is now in a prime position to help organizations build more reliable AI applications that can more accurately search, retrieve, and leverage data.
The hallucination problem
AI apps can typically handle complex problems that regular software can’t, but there’s a slight catch—they sometimes make things up. This is called “hallucinating,” and it happens when an AI generates information that’s simply incorrect. These hallucinations typically occur when the AI lacks enough context or understanding of a company’s specific data environment.
According to the press release announcing the acquisition, this can become a serious issue in high-stakes situations. Hospitals using AI for cancer screenings, investment firms using AI to make financial decisions, or law firms using it for legal advice are just a few examples of how getting bad information in these scenarios could have major consequences.
This challenge has prevented many organizations from using AI for their most critical operations.
Enhancing information retrieval capabilities
So, what can be done about this “hallucination” problem? A lot of it comes down to what is called smart information retrieval—it’s what AI needs to find and pinpoint the correct information in data quickly. This is where Voyage AI would come in. Their embedding and reranking models are designed to understand even super-specialized data, like legal documents, financial reports, images, code, etc.
“AI has the promise to transform every business, but adoption is held back by the risk of hallucinations,” said Dev Ittycheria, the CEO of MongoDB. “By bringing the power of advanced AI-powered search and retrieval to our highly flexible database, the combination of MongoDB and Voyage AI enables enterprises to easily build trustworthy AI-powered applications that drive meaningful business impact. With this acquisition, MongoDB is redefining what’s required of the database for the AI era.”
“For AI applications to reach their full potential, businesses must trust their outputs, so retrieval needs to be deeply integrated with operational data to be accurate and relevant,” said Tengyu Ma, the founder of Voyage AI. “Joining MongoDB enables us to bring our cutting-edge AI retrieval technology to a broader audience and integrate it seamlessly into mission-critical applications. By combining our expertise in embeddings and reranking with MongoDB’s best-in-class database, we can help organizations build AI applications that deliver more accurate and reliable results at scale, empowering them to confidently apply AI to high-stakes use cases.”
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