MemotivaLLM Engineer Interview Questions: Embeddings, Vector Search, and Cosine Similarity Explained

What is the difference between cosine similarity, dot product, and Euclidean distance?

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What is the difference between cosine similarity, dot product, and Euclidean distance?

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Cosine similarity measures the angle between vectors and ignores magnitude. Dot product accounts for both angle and magnitude. Euclidean distance measures the straight-line distance in vector space. For normalized embeddings, cosine similarity and dot product are equivalent. The choice depends on whether magnitude is meaningful for your embeddings; most modern embedding models are designed to be used with cosine similarity.
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