DevOps Articles

Vector Primer: Understand the Lingua Franca of Generative AI

We’re fond of saying that there’s no artificial intelligence without data. For LLMs to “understand” words, they need to be stored as text “vectors” — a way of using numbers to capture the meanings and usage patterns of words.

Let’s dig into vectors, vector search and the kinds of databases that can store and query vectors.

Storing data as vector representations enables you to perform various operations and calculations on the data, most importantly search.

Integrating vector search with a scalable data store like Astra DB enables calculations and ranking directly within the database, eliminating the need to transfer large amounts of data to external systems.