Embedding
A word, sentence or image translated into a list of numbers that captures its meaning.
A computer can't directly compare "dog" and "puppy" — but if both become vectors of 1,536 numbers, it can measure the distance between them and see they're close. That's the basis of semantic search.
Embeddings power RAG, recommendation systems and "find similar" features. Created by models like text-embedding-3 or open-source sentence-transformers.