What is Embedding?
An embedding is a numerical vector that represents the meaning of a piece of text (or image, or audio) so similar items have similar vectors.
Definition
An embedding is a vector — a long list of numbers — that represents a piece of content in a way that captures its semantic meaning. Two pieces of text with similar meanings produce vectors that are close together in the embedding space. Embeddings are the foundation of semantic search, RAG, and recommendation systems. The standard embedding models in 2026 are OpenAI's text-embedding-3-large, Cohere's embed-v3, and open-source models like BGE-M3 and Nomic-embed. Embeddings are stored in vector databases.
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