by Amit Shekhar · 31 July 2026
What are Embeddings?
Embeddings, one of the most important ideas behind modern AI like search engines, recommendations, and chatbots. We will also see why a computer cannot compare meaning on its own, how an embedding turns meaning into numbers so that similar things sit close together, how we measure that closeness, and where we use embeddings in the real world.
Read on Outcome School ↗then come back to lock it in
Before you read, guessWhat is a list of numbers representing meaning where similar items have similar values?
Ten seconds, a guess, then read — a wrong guess still makes the answer stick.
What this article covers
- The problem: computers cannot compare meaning
- What are Embeddings?
- A simple example with two numbers
- Why we need many more than two numbers
- How do we measure closeness?
- Where do embeddings come from?
- The famous word math example
- Embeddings are not only for words
- What we use embeddings for
- Things we must be careful about
- Summary
The article lives on outcomeschool.com. Read it there, then come back: the tutor in the margin has read it and will answer questions, and the questions below check what stayed.