What Embeddings Are (Vector Representations)
An embedding is a list of numbers that represents the meaning of text — similar texts have similar vectors.
From Text to Numbers
An embedding is a list of numbers (a vector) that represents the meaning of a piece of text. Texts with similar meaning have vectors that are close together in vector space.
Why Vectors?
Computers cannot do math on words but they can on numbers. Embeddings give every text a location in a high-dimensional space so we can:
- Measure similarity between texts
- Cluster related items
- Search semantically (not just by keyword)
All lessons in this course
- What Embeddings Are (Vector Representations)
- Generating Embeddings with text-embedding-3
- Cosine Similarity for Retrieval
- Embedding Models Compared (OpenAI vs Cohere vs OSS)