Can ada-002 directly answer knowledge base questions?
It cannot generate answers directly. It converts questions and documents into vectors, which the application uses to find relevant passages, and then a generative model organizes the answer. When building knowledge base question answering, document storage, similarity retrieval, and answer generation must be completed separately; the embeddings API handles the text representation part.
How can I generate vectors in batches and map them to the original text?
Submit an array of non-empty strings to input, or submit a batch made up of token arrays; both batch formats support up to 2048 items. Each item in the response data includes an index, which can be used to associate it with the input. It is recommended to also save business document IDs so that the original content can still be found after vectors are written to the index.
Can I directly submit PDFs, images, or web addresses?
This endpoint accepts text or token arrays; it is not a file parsing API. Text must first be extracted from PDFs, image content must first be converted into searchable text, and the main content must first be retrieved from web pages. Even if a URL is submitted as a string, it does not mean the model will automatically open the page and read its content.
Do float and base64 change vector dimensions?
They are used to select the return encoding, not the model or dimensions. float returns an array of numeric values, suitable for direct vector processing; base64 returns an encoded string, which must be decoded before use. The full vector for ada-002 has 1536 dimensions; a change in transmission format should not be understood as vector shortening.
Do I need to rebuild the index when switching to text-embedding-3-small?
You should re-encode the documents and build a corresponding index, and queries must also use the same new model. Vectors produced by different models should not be mixed for comparison merely because they have the same dimensionality. Before migration, you can keep the old index for comparison, use real search queries to check result quality, and then gradually switch the retrieval workflow.