Understanding Vector Embeddings: How Computers “Understand” Words, Images, and More

Have you ever wondered how computers understand things like words, pictures, or even your favorite songs? You might think computers just “see” words like we do, but actually, they only understand numbers , a lot of numbers! To make sense of complex things, computers use something called vector embeddings. Don’t worry, it’s simpler than it sounds.

Imagine Organizing Recipes

Think about all the recipes in your kitchen. Some are sweet cakes, some spicy soups, and some healthy salads. If you wanted to organize them so similar recipes are near each other, you might look at:

• How sweet they are

• How spicy they are

• How long they take to cook

You could give each recipe a few numbers. For example:

• Chocolate Cake → [sweet=9, spicy=0, time=2]

• Vegetable Soup → [sweet=1, spicy=3, time=3]

• Vanilla Cake → [sweet=8, spicy=0, time=2]

Suddenly, recipes that are similar are numerically close together, and very different recipes are far apart. That’s exactly what vector embeddings do, but for computers.

Words, Images, and Numbers

Let’s take words as an example. The computer doesn’t “know” what a king or queen is. But if we turn words into numbers (vectors), the computer can see relationships between them. For example:

• King → [0.2, -0.4, 0.9]

• Queen → [0.25, -0.38, 0.92]

• Man → [0.1, -0.5, 0.85]

Now the computer can do fun things like:

king - man + woman ≈ queen

Because in this number space, the relationship between king and queen is very similar to the relationship between man and woman.

Why This Matters

Vector embeddings are everywhere:

• Search engines use them to find documents that are similar to your query.

• Recommendation systems use them to suggest movies, songs, or products.

• Chatbots and AI use them to understand your questions and give relevant answers.

In short, embeddings are a way to turn complex things into numbers so computers can understand, compare, and reason about them.

Wrapping Up

Next time you search for a recipe online, get a song recommendation, or talk to an AI, remember: behind the scenes, everything is numbers. Vector embeddings are like the secret code that helps computers make sense of our world.