An embedding is a list of numbers that represents the meaning of a piece of text (or an image) in a form software can work with. Items with similar meaning get similar numbers, so a computer can measure how "close" two things are — even if they share no words. "Car" and "automobile" land near each other; "car" and "banana" do not.
Embeddings power search that understands meaning rather than just matching keywords, recommendation systems, and the retrieval step in RAG. You rarely see embeddings directly, but they are one of the quiet building blocks behind modern AI features that "just seem to get" what you mean.
Related terms
Large Language Model (LLM) · Machine Learning (ML) · RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)