Definition
Plain language
A list of numbers that represents the meaning of a word or sentence, so the computer can compare meanings mathematically.
As stated in the literature
A dense vector representation of a discrete input (token, sentence, image patch), learned so that semantic similarity corresponds to vector closeness.
Also called: embeddings
Why it matters: Embeddings are the bridge between symbolic data and the geometric world where neural networks actually do their work, underlying everything from search to retrieval-augmented generation.
For example, the words 'king' and 'queen' end up with very similar embeddings, while 'king' and 'broccoli' point in very different directions.
Heard on the show
“… Under the shared-embedding pipeline — where pictures and text queries live in one numeric space, CLIP-style — ninety-nine …”Episode 247 — One Edited Photo, an Honest Caption, and a RAG System That Believes It