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Core
Vector Search and ANN Indexes: HNSW, IVF, Quantization
Why exact nearest-neighbor search does not scale, how HNSW, IVF, and product quantization trade recall for speed, and how to handle filtering and updates.
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TAUGHT IN THESE COURSES
This concept is a reference. These lessons put it in sequence, with what comes before and after it.
Applied AI Engineering·How language models work, enough to build onFree13mEmbeddings: why a computer can suddenly tell that two sentences mean the same thingEmbeddings are the reason search stopped depending on matching words. This lesson builds the intuition from a problem you already have, shows what the geometry does and does not know, and sets up why retrieval works at all.Applied AI Engineering·RetrievalFree14mWhy your search misses the obvious answerPure vector search fails in two specific, predictable ways, and both have standard fixes that most first systems are missing. This lesson covers the two-stage design that turns a demo into something that finds the right passage.Applied AI Engineering·RetrievalFree240mProject: build a retrieval system over your own documentsThe first project of the course. Build a working question-answering system over documents you actually have, in five stages, each one checkable on its own, and finish with something honest enough to put in a portfolio.
RELATED CONCEPTS
PRACTICE THIS IN REAL QUESTIONS
System Design for AI in ProductionDesign a vector database / embedding retrieval service.→System Design for AI in ProductionDesign a two-tower retrieval system for recommendation/candidate generation.→RAG & Agent System DesignWhat is HyDE (Hypothetical Document Embeddings), and why does it improve retrieval?→RAG & Agent System DesignWhat is semantic chunking, and how does it compare to fixed-size chunking?→System Design for AI in ProductionDesign a RAG-as-a-service platform that lets teams build retrieval-augmented apps over their own data.→RAG & Agent System DesignDesign a production RAG system over 10M documents serving ~1,000 QPS at sub-second latency.→
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