consider chromadb alternatives

[cmungall]

chroma is very slow on the EC2 instance. I don't think the issue is with any fancy vector operations - it's just basic lookup operations and extracting metadata for a collection that seems to be slow.

I am not sure we actually need a vector database. It may be better to use a dedicated document store that has some kind of vector plugin

solr/ES has vector extensions. However, I don't think this would be good as a primary store for editable data

sqlite has vector extensions https://simonwillison.net/2023/Oct/23/embeddings/ -- seems to require. aplugin https://github.com/asg017/sqlite-vss -- this may make the overall build more complicated..

the native datamodel for curategpt is json documents so using mongodb as a base would be perfect. There is atlas but this seems to force some kind of cloud deployment - https://www.mongodb.com/products/platform/atlas-vector-search - this might be a good way to go bit we want the option to keep it simple with local files

cc @julesjacobsen