At Mixedbread, we are trying to strike a balance that feels increasingly hard to get just right: our goal is to be a research lab whose work directly feeds into a product, rather than a product company which happens to occasionally require research.
This has led us to think a lot about why we do research, how we do it, and how we can strike the right balance between offering an attractive product to users while contributing to the broader research community. In this blog post, we're sharing some of our early thoughts on our reasons for setting up Mixedbread as such, the way we approach research and decide what to work on, and how we intend to achieve this balance.
We fundamentally believe that information retrieval and capital-S Search are fundamental areas of research in the currently nascent AI era. There are two reasons for this belief.
The first one is that neural retrieval, at its core, is about understanding how to shape and align the embedding space so that the re