Applied AI·Embeddings and retrieval
you compare the query against every stored vector, which was fine at ten thousand rows and hopeless at ten million.
Nearest neighbour search (k-NN)
Also calledk-NN
Draft summary, pending review
Finding the k stored vectors closest to a query vector. Done exactly, it means comparing against every stored vector: fine for thousands of items, too slow for millions, which is why approximate methods exist.