In December of 2022, I was scrolling Twitter in the wee-hours of the morning holding my then-newborn daughter. ChatGPT had launched, and we were all figuring out what this technology was and how to make it useful. Developers were using retrieval to bring their data to the models - and so I DM’d every person who had tweeted about “embeddings” in the entire month of December. (it was only 120 people!) I saw then how AI was going to need to search to all the world’s information to build useful and reliable applications.
Anton Troynikov and I started Chroma with the beliefs that:
1. AI-based systems were way too difficult to productionize
2. Latent space was incredibly important to improving AI-based systems (no one understood this at the time)
On Valentines Day 2023, we launched first version of Chroma and it immediately took off. Chroma made retrieval just work. Chroma is now a large open-source project with 21k+ stars and 5M monthly downloads, used at companies like Apple, Amazon, Salesforce, and Microsoft.
Today we’re excited to launch Chroma Cloud - our fully-managed offering backed by an Apache 2.0 serverless database called Chroma Distributed. Chroma Distributed is written in Rust and uses object-storage for extreme scalability and reliability. Chroma Cloud is fast and cheap. Leading AI companies such as Factory, Weights & Biases, Propel, and Foam already use Chroma Cloud in production to power their agents. It brings the “it just works” developer experience developers have come to know Chroma for - to the Cloud.
Try it out and let me know what you think!
— Jeff