Phase 2 · Math, when you need it · Linear algebra
Vector arithmetic and length
Add, scale and measure vectors.
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Why it matters
Most of what AI models do to data comes down to four moves: add vectors, stretch them, measure how long they are, and measure how far apart they are. "Find customers like this one" is a distance measurement. AI search compares the directions of word vectors. Even the famous trick "king − man + woman ≈ queen" is just subtracting and adding lists of numbers. Learn these four moves and you have the vocabulary for everything that follows.
What you'll be able to do
- Add, subtract and scale vectors, in code and as pictures
- Compute a vector's length (norm) and the distance between two vectors
- Normalize a vector to length 1 and say why embeddings often are
- Find the nearest neighbor of a vector by distance
Before this lesson
Next in this phase: Dot product and cosine similarity