Glossary — Language models
Embedding
An embedding is a list of numbers representing the meaning of a piece of text, arranged so that similar meanings end up close together.
1 tokensEmbedding
Simply put#
The model turns a sentence into a row of numbers — typically a few hundred to a few thousand. Nearby rows mean nearby meaning, even when the words are completely different.
Example#
"How much does it cost?" and "What is the price?" share almost no words but land in nearly the same place as embeddings. That is what makes meaning-based search possible.
Why it matters to you#
This is the engine inside RAG. If your search has to find things by meaning rather than by exact word, embeddings are what do it.