<antirez>

* For years, despite functional evidence and scientific hints accumulating, certain AI researchers continued to claim LLMs were stochastic parrots: probabilistic machines that would: 1. NOT have any representation about the meaning of the prompt. 2. NOT have any representation about what they were going to say. In 2025 finally almost everybody stopped saying so.

* Chain of thought is now a fundamental way to improve LLM output. But, what is CoT? Why it improves output? I believe it is two things: 1. Sampling in the model representations (that is, a form of internal search). After information and concepts relevant to the prompt topic is in the context window, the model can better reply. 2. But if you mix this to reinforcement learning, the model also learns to put one token after the other (each token will change the model state) in order to converge to some useful reply.

I’m taking a few weeks of pause on my HNSWs developments (now working on some other data structure, news soon). At this point, the new type I added to Redis is stable and complete enough, it’s the perfect moment to reason about what I learned about HNSWs, and turn it into a blog post. That kind of brain dump that was so common pre-AI era, and now has become, maybe, a bit more rare. Well, after almost one year of thinking and implementing HNSWs and vector similarity stuff, it is time for some writing. However this is not going to be an intro on HNSWs: too many are present already. This is the “extra mile” instead. If you know HNSWs, I want to share with you my more “advanced” findings, especially in the context of making them fast enough to allow for a “Redis” experience: you know, Redis is designed for low latency and high performance, and HNSWs are kinda resistant to that, so there were challenges to expose HNSWs as an abstract data structure.

Regardless of their flaws, AI systems continue to impress with their ability to replicate certain human skills. Even if imperfect, such systems were a few years ago science fiction. It was not even clear that we were so near to create machines that could understand the human language, write programs, and find bugs in a complex code base: bugs that escaped the code review of a competent programmer.

Since LLMs and in general deep models are poorly understood, and even the most prominent experts in the field failed miserably again and again to modulate the expectations (with incredible errors on both sides: of reducing or magnifying what was near to come), it is hard to tell what will come next. But even before the Transformer architecture, we were seeing incredible progress for many years, and so far there is no clear sign that the future will not hold more. After all, a plateau of the current systems is possible and very credible, but it would likely stimulate, at this point, massive research efforts in the next step of architectures.

Frontier LLMs such as Gemini 2.5 PRO, with their vast understanding of many topics and their ability to grasp thousands of lines of code in a few seconds, are able to extend and amplify the programmer capabilities. If you are able to describe problems in a clear way and, if you are able to accept the back and forth needed in order to work with LLMs, you can reach incredible results such as:

1. Eliminating bugs you introduced in your code before it ever hits any user: I experienced this with Vector Sets implementation of Redis. I would end eliminating all the bugs eventually, but many were just removed immediately by Gemini / Claude code reviews.

This is a short story of how humans are still so much more capable of LLMs. Note that I'm not anti-AI or alike, you know it if you know me / follow me somewhere. I use LLMs routinely, like I did today, when I want to test my ideas, for code reviews, to understand if there are better approaches than what I had in mind, to explore stuff at the limit of my expertise, and so forth (I wrote a blog post about coding with LLMs almost two years, when it was not exactly cool: I was already using LLMs for coding and never stopped, I'll have to write an update, but that's not the topic of this post).

Yesterday, it was a very intense day. In Italy it was 1st of May, the workers holiday, so in the morning I went for a 4h walk in the Etna with friends <3, I love walking, and I often take pauses when coding just to walk, to return later at the keyboard with a few more kilometers on my legs, and walking in the Etna is amazing (Etna is the largest active volcano in Europe, and I happen to live in Catania, that is on its slopes).

Then at 6PM I was at home to release my blog post about the AGPL license switch, and I started following the comments, feedbacks, private messages, and I learned a few things in the process.

Five months ago, I rejoined Redis and quickly started to talk with my colleagues about a possible switch to the AGPL license, only to discover that there was already an ongoing discussion, a very old one, too. Many people, within the company, had the feeling that the AGPL was a better pick than SSPL, and while eventually Redis switched to the SSPL license, the internal discussion continued.

I tried to give more strength to the ongoing pro-AGPL license side. My feeling was that the SSPL, in practical terms, failed to be accepted by the community. The OSI wouldn’t accept it, nor would the software community regard the SSPL as an open license. In little time, I saw the hypothesis getting more and more traction, at all levels within the company hierarchy.

About three years ago I saw a quite curious and interesting post on Hacker News. A student, Christopher Tarry, was able to use cosine similarity against a vector of top words frequencies in comments, in order to detect similar HN accounts — and, sometimes, even accounts actually controlled by the same user, that is, fake accounts used to uncover the identity of the writer.

This is the original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

I was not aware, back then, of Burrows-Delta method for style detection: it seemed kinda magical that you just needed to normalize a frequency vector of top words to reach such quite remarkable results. I read a few wikipedia pages and took mental note of it. Then, as I was working with Vectors for Redis I remembered about this post, searched the web only to discover that the original page was gone and that the author, in the original post and website, didn’t really explained very well how the data was processed, the top words extracted (and, especially, how many were used) and so forth. I thought I could reproduce the work with Vector Sets, once I was done with the main work. Now the new data type is in the release candidate, and I found some time to work on the problem. This is a report of what I did, but before to continue, the mandatory demo site: you can play with it at the following link:

Yesterday we finally merged vector sets into Redis, here you can find the README that explains in detail what you get:

https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/unstable/modules/vector-sets/README.md

The goal of the new data structure is, in short, to create a new “Set alike” data type, similar to Sorted Sets, where instead of having a scalar as a score, you have a vector, and you can add and remove elements the Redis way, without caring about anything except the properties of the abstract data structure Redis implements, ask for elements similar to a given query vector (or a vector associated to some element already in the set), and so forth. But more about that later, a bit of background, first:

I used AI with success 5 minutes ago.

Just five minutes ago, I was writing a piece of software and relied on AI for assistance. Yet, here I am, starting this blog post by telling you that artificial intelligence, so far, has proven somewhat useless. How can I make such a statement if AI was just so helpful a moment ago? Actually, there's no contradiction here if we clarify exactly what we mean.

Here’s the thing: at this very moment, artificial intelligence can support me significantly. If I'm struggling with complicated code or need to understand an advanced scientific paper on math, I can turn to AI for clarity. It can help me generate an image for a project, make a translation, clean my YouTube transcript. Clearly, it’s practical and beneficial in these everyday tasks.