FAISS
An open-source software library developed by Meta that enables extremely fast and highly efficient similarity search and clustering for dense numerical vectors.
Think of It Like This
Like a highly organized library index that lets you instantly find a specific book out of millions without having to read every single title on the shelf.
Facebook AI Similarity Search (FAISS) is a standard tool for building vector databases and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines. It implements various approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) algorithms that compress vectors and divide the search space. This allows for millisecond-level query times even when searching through billions of high-dimensional embeddings.