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Hammad Bashir

Hammad Bashir

CTO of Chroma, the open-source AI search/database company, and frequent speaker on vector search and agentic retrieval.

Sep 24, 2026

24:51
You got Vector+BM25, Hybrid Search, Regex/Grep, Redocument, and Prune Chunks, and there could be a lot to cover there, but I think more to the point of, like, why those four specifically?
25:03
Yeah.
25:03
I think, I mean, the standard paradigm for any agentic search harness is you just want to give the model two tools, which is, one, allow it to search, and the second is allow it to fetch results that it sees.
25:17
So give it a way to get its 10 blue links from Google, and then give it a way to click the link.
25:22
Those are the two things that you're trying to give it.
25:24
And then the one thing that we were interested in is this idea of self-editing context or active context management.
25:31
So the predominant paradigm to managing long context windows is compaction.

22 MINS LATER

47:08
So just looking, I guess, ahead, the future, obviously Postgres is having a other moment these days, and I think people just say, "Oh, well, pgvector is, like, good enough for things like this." Like, where do you see things going as like, are we, I guess, asking the devil advocate here of like could things converge back to, you know, a frontier large model is actually gonna get good enough at this stuff and context R- isn't such a thing anymore, or like how are you guys thinking about it, and like how are you thinking of building it into the future?

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