What distinguishes Pinecone from other vector databases, and what benefits can it offer to potential users?

To be honest, I don't think that much when I'm choosing my tech stack. I just use whatever is popular, or what people talk about the most, because I'm too lazy to think about the technologies from first principles. Also, because I'm not building something for scalability. I'm building stuff for prototyping. If everyone's talking about that, I'm just going to outsource my decision-making to what people are talking about. I've seen the LangChain guy multiple meetups and I talked to him and it's like, cool, it seems like this is trending. I'm going to make random experiments with AI to get some clout on Twitter using the popular libraries right now. That was basically it. 

In terms of why Pinecone over something that's free open source, it's like if I'm building something prototyping, it's almost always easier to use the hosted version. Because I'm not going to go over their quota and it's probably just going to work the best with the least amount of work. Then I can just, again, mention them in my tweet, launching it. Then they'll retweet me. That's what they all did. Then they DM me like, "Hey, we want to learn more about what you're building." It's like, okay, cool. Even this conversation, right?

You want to talk to me because I'm using Pinecone and LangChain, but I'm just using them because other people are using them. But I think that's so important, though, at the same time, which is that languages and technologies all have network effects, and it's not always the best product wins. Like Athens, our tech stack was, closure, closure script, data script, these functional programming languages, these graph databases, super esoteric stuff. I'm not using that anymore. Maybe there might be a use case in the future where this definitely makes sense to use. But, at the end of day, it's just easier to use TypeScript and Postgres and React because everyone's using that. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way because that momentum just makes everyone evolve that tool chain more.