alt Hacker NewsThose are some really spicy opinions. It would seem that many search experts might not agree.
David Tippet (formerly opensearch and now at Github)
A great podcast with David Tippet and Nicolay Gerold entitled:
"BM25 is the workhorse of search; vectors are its visionary cousin"
Replies
dumb1224 • last Wednesday at 11:25 AM
Agreed. In the 2000s it was all about BM25 in the NLP community. I hardly see any paper that did not mention it in my opinion.
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I’m sure Search experts would disagree, because it’d be their technology they’d be admitting is inferior to another. BM25 is the workhorse, no doubt— but it’s also not the best anymore. Vectors are a step toward learning models, but only a small mid-range step vs. an explicit model.
Search is a useful approach for computing learning models, but there’s a difference between the computational means and the model. For example, MIPS is a very useful search algo for computing learning models (but first the learning model has to be formulated).