This could not be more timely! I have a similar project in mind that would instead deal with transcriptions from what are essentially stories aired from a radio show, but I’m afraid I’m even more foreign to the world of semantic search. Hopefully you can clear some things up for me:
If the language I’m dealing with isn’t English, am I right to assume that I will have to find an embedding model that is meant to deal with that language?
Is creating embeddings the only way to achieve something similar to yours, wouldn’t pointing an LLM towards a large corpus of text have the same result? (Definitely being very loose with terms when saying “point an LLM”)
How much does it cost to run a web app like yours (depends on the traffic, yes, but let’s assume that it’s just sitting there)?
There are probably other questions, but these came to mind immediately.
I hope this will be useful to you! Let me answer your questions:
Yes, the embedding model I used specifies that it’s only good for English, you need to find either a model for the language you’re targeting, or a larger multilingual one.
While I’m not sure if using an LLM wholesale to create embeddings would work, since their first step is to create embeddings anyway, it would be more expensive to use an LLM anyway.
My demo runs free, thanks to the generous free tiers Vercel and Supabase provide! You can check how much allowance is there on their respective pricing pages.
Let me also answer an unasked question, I didn’t fine tune the app for performance, for example I don’t use vector indices, which may affect the cost. If it was more than a demo, I would be more careful.
This is a great idea. I need more semantic search in my life.
This could not be more timely! I have a similar project in mind that would instead deal with transcriptions from what are essentially stories aired from a radio show, but I’m afraid I’m even more foreign to the world of semantic search. Hopefully you can clear some things up for me:
There are probably other questions, but these came to mind immediately.
I hope this will be useful to you! Let me answer your questions:
Yes, the embedding model I used specifies that it’s only good for English, you need to find either a model for the language you’re targeting, or a larger multilingual one.
While I’m not sure if using an LLM wholesale to create embeddings would work, since their first step is to create embeddings anyway, it would be more expensive to use an LLM anyway.
My demo runs free, thanks to the generous free tiers Vercel and Supabase provide! You can check how much allowance is there on their respective pricing pages.
Let me also answer an unasked question, I didn’t fine tune the app for performance, for example I don’t use vector indices, which may affect the cost. If it was more than a demo, I would be more careful.