The timelessness of vector databases | Pinecone’s Ram Sriharsha

**Andrew Zigler** (0:06)
Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Andrew Zigler.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:10)
And I'm your host, Ben Lloyd Pearson.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:12)
This week, we're sitting down with Pinecone CTO, Ram Sriharsha, who joins the conversation to make the definitive case that vector databases are more critical now than ever. And we caught up with him live in person at ELC in San Francisco. But first, we have the news roundup for the week, and we have a few interesting ones to cover today. And one of them is a response, actually, to an article we covered last week by Mathias Lima. And this article is from Sean Godecki talking about work politics for engineers. Another thing that caught our attention in the news is celebrating one trillion web pages archived on archive.org. An amazing achievement, but also a month of celebration for all things, archiving and recollecting digital history. And a Coinbase engineer shared more details about their AI use case for code generation, which taps into a story we covered a few weeks ago. And last but certainly not least, the largest anthropic enterprise AI rollout to date just happened. A lot of really interesting things happening in the news. What do you want to dive into first, Ben?

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (1:18)
Well, first of all, I'm super excited for our guests because I just started using Pinecone this week to build some agents for our workflows at Dev Interrupted. Super fun tool to use, but let's talk about the other tool, the other AI tool that I really love as well, and that's Anthropic. I want to hear what's going on here. Yeah.

**Andrew Zigler** (1:38)
So the largest Anthropic Cloud rollout to date just happened for Deloitte. And Deloitte is making Cloud available to 470,000 technologists across its global network and organization. Talk about a huge adoption wave of folks picking up this AI tool for what's really the first time inside of this large traditional enterprise. This marks a really powerful transition of AI being an everyday tool for knowledge workers. And this was covered in an article we read from Hithi Cyborg, which has actually quite a number of really interesting articles from this week. So we're going to make sure we embed his really great roundup in this post so you can go check it out. Also featured in there is a Google bug hunting bot called Codemender, who hunts bugs in your codebase overnight. And OpenAI being valued more than SpaceX. So be sure to go check out those articles. They're really great. But the Anthropic and Deloitte announcement is an expanded alliance that brings to AI closer to knowledge workers in a way never done before for its type of industry. And as part of this, Deloitte understands the challenges that it's going to be heading face first into. So they've actually established a Claude Center of Excellence. And this is a center of trained specialists that are going to create implementation frameworks for how the Deloitte technologists are going to adopt and roll out AI. So this represents a really fascinating learning opportunity for the rest of the industry to pay attention to what's going to matter to Deloitte at their Claude Center of Excellence. Because this collaboration is representing, you know, the work of both sides, both Anthropic and Deloitte. So you're talking about folks in the seat using AI to have massive impact for a huge company, global company at scale, and a technology firm making that model possible. So there's so many fascinating things happening in this story. Ben, what do you think?

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (3:30)
Yeah, you're right. I mean, there's a lot of reasons that I love this story. And part of it is, you know, our producer Adam, he was showing us the Claude's new ad campaign that they're out with right now. It has slogans like, keep thinking, like the AI for problem solvers. And I feel like those two slogans like, pretty much describe like the role of consultants, you know, like Claude really is for consultants in my opinion. But there's like two kind of things that sort of stand out about this to me. The first is that, you know, Claude is the most verbose GPT platform that I use, like by far.

**Andrew Zigler** (4:04)
You're absolutely right.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (4:05)
And in the hands of a consultant, I feel like that could be very dangerous. Like, I'm sure there's a lot of people at Deloitte that are going to be introduced to this tool for the first time. Probably going to be making all the same mistakes that we all did when we first started with GPTs. One piece of advice, if there's anyone from Deloitte listening, don't ask Claude to write your emails. Like, it just always writes a novel, and no matter how many times you ask it to make it shorter, it will never be short enough. But more importantly, you know, Claude is this incredibly powerful artifact generator. And when it's connected to useful data sources, as I'm sure consultants at Deloitte have, it can produce really useful components in seconds. Like, you can build UI and UX components. You can build data visualizations. You can summarize things, any type of thing in any way that you would want to. Create automation scripts based on a database schema. Like, you know, there's so many different things that you can do with Claude because of how it's designed to generate artifacts.