Day 0: A Sea of Calm Amidst an Incoming Vector Processing Storm
For devotees of the HBO tv series Succession, a trip to Montauk in the Hamptons where some scenes were filmed conjures images of stressful corporate intrigue and occasional weekend away-breaks for the despicable characters to do more business. Happily, unlike in Succession, in the Montauk where I find myself, there is no Logan Roy-like megalomaniac CEO nor any ambitious, selfish children with their ambitious +1s uttering expletives, nor apparatchik consultants riding roughshod over expendable employees. Instead, I find a sea of calm.
This is good. Tomorrow brings KX CON [23], one of a select few conferences where participants actually deliver change, and don’t just talk about it. Where else would sessions be contributed from Goldman Sachs, Citadel Investments, Jump Trading, Morgan Stanley, Virtu Financial, AWS, Snowflake, PIMCO, Syneos Health and more? Yet more excitingly, we embrace a virtual tornado backdrop of fascinating technologies that both excite and challenge. They include:
An Incoming Vector Processing Storm is Here!
Vectors are back, not that they ever went away for some of us. Large Language Models (LLMs), for example, which power ChatGPT and other generative AI apps, use the same old vectors we know and love, but with a new vocabulary: vector embeddings, vector transformations and vector search operating within vector databases. With this new vector database age, now is the time to navigate the vector processing storm and make it the sea of calm. With kdb+ long operating as a vector native database, it provides not just vector embedding stores and search but full storage capabilities, powerful compute and vector native analytics, KX CON [23] looks forward to sessions on Vector Programming for Data Engineers and Vector Thinking in Python.
The Data Science and AI Economy
LLMs are key to one form of transformative AI, but data science and AI is everywhere around us, the ANPR in parking lots, social media content you get served, e-Commerce pricing adjustments, intelligent robots on production lines, and more. Evolving mathematical models powered by larger data sets delivering insights at the speed of thought is the lifeblood of the modern economy. KX CON [23] looks forward to multiple sessions, including Data Science in Action and AI at Scale, showing how the Python open source ecosystem in particular can harness the power of production workloads immediately.
The Cloud Paradox
The Cloud is our decade’s enabler of data science, AI and the new generation of vector processing. It brings cheaper storage, readily available compute and service accessibility to more teams meaning greater collaboration, improved lifecycles and faster time-to-value via AIOps, DevOps, MLOps, and FinOps. Trouble is, cloud can be addictive, and addictions bring pressures. With cloud, organizations face cost and sustainability pressures for example, driving the so-called Cloud Paradox, greater capability on one hand but often unpredictable cost impacts on the other. Organizations must work together to deliver scale, efficiency and provide spend predictability and sustainability. Efficient ways to improve data processing, transformation, and deploy simple and advanced algorithms quickly have always been the lifeblood of kdb users on Wall Street and increasingly Main Street, hence why the speaker list for KX CON [23] is so extraordinary. They know that not a single byte of code is wasted for ultimate efficiency. That is also why this year, KX CON [23] features Keynote sessions from AWS and Snowflake demonstrating the right balance between innovation and efficiency, to secure our machine learning, data science, time series and vector processing futures.
KX welcomes everyone to Montauk for KX CON [23]