What does cosine similarity measure for embeddings?
PICTURE THIS: 1, 2, 2, 8
Simple meaning
Cosine similarity measures the angle between two vectors, not their raw length.
WHY — Tokens instead of words?
LLMs use tokens (not full words) because it helps them:
who only read docs from people who shipped.
and tied to GenAI / LLM work.
Each piece maps to a number the network can learn.
Fixed pieces are what transformers expect as input.
STEPS — What happens with tokens?
Before the model can read a sentence, it goes through these steps:
- 1Cosine similarity measures the
angle between two vectors, not their raw length.
- 2Values near 1 mean
the directions align, so the items are treated as similar.
- 3It is the usual
score for comparing normalized text embeddings.
- 4Context mix
Attention looks at nearby tokens together.
- 5Next token
The model scores what should come next.
- 6Decode
IDs turn back into readable text.
EXAMPLE — See it in action
Let's see how a real sentence is tokenized (tokens may vary by model):
Note: Actual tokens and IDs depend on the tokenizer (e.g., GPT, Llama, etc.).
Key takeaway
Cosine similarity measures the angle between two vectors, not their raw length. Values near 1 mean the directions align, so the items are treated as similar.