{"slug": "embedding-at-the-speed-of-light", "title": "Embedding at the Speed of Light", "summary": "A static embedding model, potion-base-8M, embedded 32.9 million passages on a laptop CPU in 35 minutes, a task that would have taken a transformer-based model roughly 53 days, according to the article. The static approach skips the neural network entirely, using a lookup table that maps each vocabulary token to a vector and averaging those vectors per text. The tradeoff is retrieval quality, since without transformer layers tokens never influence each other.", "body_md": "Embedding a large corpus is usually the slowest part of building a vector search pipeline: transformer-based models capture semantics very well, but they are heavy on CPU, so you either wait days for the embeddings or pay for a costly GPU.\n\nStatic embedding models avoid that cost by skipping the neural network altogether. A static model is a lookup table that associates each token in the model’s vocabulary with an embedding: to embed a text, you tokenize it, look up the vector of each token, and average them. With `potion-base-8M`, this let us embed 32.9 million passages on a laptop CPU in 35 minutes, where a transformer-based model would have needed about 53 days. The tradeoff is retrieval quality, because without layers the tokens never influence each other.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/embedding-at-the-speed-of-light", "canonical_source": "https://qdrant.tech/articles/embedding-at-the-speed-of-light/", "published_at": "2026-11-04 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-11-10 14:51:04.262394+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-research", "natural-language-processing", "machine-learning", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["potion-base-8M"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/embedding-at-the-speed-of-light", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/embedding-at-the-speed-of-light.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/embedding-at-the-speed-of-light.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/embedding-at-the-speed-of-light.jsonld"}}