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brabeltoday at 10:14 AM4 repliesview on HN

The whole embedding thing which converts “tokens” to vectors, which you then store in a vector database so that you can later query by vector distance, seems to be LLM specific technology, no? As far as I know the vectors look a lot like the weights in a LLM itself which is why the vector search also works with some level of intelligence.


Replies

triangletoday at 10:23 AM

Vector embeddings predate LLMs. They have been used as far back as the early 2000s. They are a general machine learning technique, rather than LLM specific

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nilirltoday at 10:28 AM

Sure and that's a new technique for indexing and querying.

Where's the new design tension? Indexes always had to be monitored for freshness and queries have always needed cleaning or parsing.

KaseyKimtoday at 11:12 AM

right, it is the foundation of machine learning.

ewidartoday at 10:34 AM

not really, vectorising text/books is old school ML by this point.

at least to me that seems the same as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word2vec for e.g.

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