Weaviate 1.40 ships Namespaces GA, RQ-4 quantization, HFresh/MUVERA improvements and a default-on Search REST API

What changed

Weaviate released v1.40.0 on October 7. Namespaces are now generally available for control-plane and data isolation on shared clusters, while dropping an existing vector index also reaches GA to reclaim unused index storage. The release further optimizes HFresh, decouples routing and rerank budgets for HFresh MUVERA, adds 4-bit Rotational Quantization (RQ-4), and makes the Search REST API default-on with hybrid, near-object, near-vector and aggregate-count endpoints. It also adds optional replica-deduplicated backups and hardens asynchronous replication, backup reliability and security controls.