IRREVERENT DEMYSTIFIERS

What are: Embeddings? Vector Databases? Vector Search? k-NN? ANN?

A simple explainer to debuzz these AI buzzwords

Are you drowning in buzzwords and unsure what the fascination with these terms is?

• Embeddings
• Vector databases
• Vector search
• k-NN and ANN

Never fear, I’ll help you understand the context and the basics without getting you mired in the nitty gritty details.

What’s the context for using these terms?

The things you can do with AI are pretty awesome, but there’s a catch. If you’re automating at scale, you might find that AI is slow or expensive or both.

Hence all the buzz about vector search, vector databases, and so on. The context is need for speed, especially when it comes to text (think GPT and its friends).

The context is need for speed.

So when you hear these terms, what you’re hearing is several million frustrated engineers sighing in relief that these things exist, then grumbling little demands for it all to be even better, cheaper, faster. (All while forgetting just how magical it is that we can train models on these wild amounts of data in the first place. Ah, the human condition.)