It begs the question though, doesn't it...? Embeddings require a neural network or some reasonable facsimile to produce the embedding in the first place. Compression to a vector (a semantic space of some sort) still needs to happen – and that's the crux of the understanding/meaning. To just say "embeddings are cool let's use them" is ignoring the core problem of semantics/meaning/information-in-context etc. Knowing where an embedding came from is pretty damn important.
Embeddings live a very biased existence. They are the product of a network (or some algorithm) that was trained (or built) with specific data (and/or code) and assume particular biases intrinsically (network structure/algorithm) or extrinsically (e.g., data used to train a network) which they impose on the translation of data into some n-dimensional space. Any engineered solution always lives with such limitations, but with the advent of more and more sophisticated methods for the generation of them, I feel like it's becoming more about the result than the process. This strikes me as problematic on a global scale... might be fine for local problems but could be not-so-great in an ever changing world.
Not that I'm arguing one way or another, but everyone posting "Hanlon's Razor, QED" should consider that Hanlon's Razor is 1) a heuristic and 2) breaks down _very_ quickly around psycho/sociopaths.
Embeddings live a very biased existence. They are the product of a network (or some algorithm) that was trained (or built) with specific data (and/or code) and assume particular biases intrinsically (network structure/algorithm) or extrinsically (e.g., data used to train a network) which they impose on the translation of data into some n-dimensional space. Any engineered solution always lives with such limitations, but with the advent of more and more sophisticated methods for the generation of them, I feel like it's becoming more about the result than the process. This strikes me as problematic on a global scale... might be fine for local problems but could be not-so-great in an ever changing world.