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Retrieval & EmbeddingsMedium· Generative Retrieval· Latency· ANN

Why does generative retrieval query latency stay flat a...

The query cost for generative retrieval is proportional to the number of symbols needed to address the documents, which is roughly log10(N). While not strictly constant, it scales much more slowly than ANN search, which requires (1 + nprobe) * sqrt(N) comparisons. The intuition is that the model ‘memorizes’ the corpus, turning retrieval into a generation task.

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