Word Embeddings Explained: The Math Behind AI, LLMs, and Chatbots

Originally published on malcolmlow.net When a search engine retrieves a document about automobiles in response to a query about cars, it is not matching text character by character. Somewhere beneath the interface, the system understands that these two words are semantically related. The mechanism behind that understanding is the word embedding — and once you see the geometry, you cannot unsee it. This article walks through the key mathematical operations that make embeddings work: distance,...