Can text-embedding-3-large directly answer knowledge base questions?
It cannot directly generate answers. It converts questions and document chunks into vectors, helping the retrieval system find relevant content. A complete question-answering workflow typically retrieves relevant passages first, then uses a generation model to compose the answer; the embedding returned by the embeddings API is not itself an answer and does not include an explanation.
Should I use the full 3072 dimensions or reduce the dimensionality?
When quality is the priority, you can start with the full dimensionality; if your vector database has dimension limits or the index is large, you can test a reduced-dimension configuration. Official examples provide 1024- and 256-dimension options, but the specific trade-off should be determined using your own query set after comparing retrieval performance and storage overhead.
Why choose large instead of text-embedding-3-small?
At release, large performed better on average in multilingual retrieval and English task evaluations, making it suitable for applications with higher retrieval quality requirements. small is oriented toward efficiency. It is recommended to compare them using the same corpus and real queries, focusing on difficult cases rather than deciding based solely on the model name.
After batch input, how do I match each result to its input?
You can place multiple non-empty texts in the input array to generate multiple vectors in a single request. In the response data, each item includes an index and embedding, which can be used to associate it with the original input. When saving vectors, you should also save the document identifier, chunk position, and dimensions used to facilitate later retrieval.
How should I choose between float and base64?
float returns an array of numbers by default, suitable for direct use with programs or vector databases that require numeric vectors. base64 returns an encoded string, suitable for systems that already have a corresponding decoding workflow. They change the return representation, not the embedding task, and do not replace dimensionality control through dimensions.