AI engineering glossary · RAG vector search
What is FAISS?
FAISS: An open-source library from Meta for similarity search and clustering of dense vectors. It offers flat, IVF, HNSW and quantised indexes, runs on CPU and GPU, and is widely used as a building block for retrieval.
FAISS: an example
A prototype builds a FAISS IVF index over 500,000 chunk embeddings and queries it from a Python script.
Related terms
More RAG vector search terms
- Faithfulness
- Fixed-size chunking
- Flat index
- Full-text search
- Golden dataset
- GraphRAG
- Hallucination
- Hamming distance
Where you learn it
FAISS is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.