[dheera]

It's just a normalized dot product. People use "cosine similarity" to sound knowledgeable

[youssefabdelm]

Hm for me interactive visualizations are more illuminating:

https://www.falstad.com/dotproduct/

https://wordsandbuttons.online/interactive_mnemonics_for_dot...

In essence then, not as confusing to the beginner who might even know what a dot product 'is' operationally but not what it 'does'.

So level 1 'it's just a normalized dot product', level 2 more immediately intuitive: 'is arrow 1 pointing in the same direction as arrow 2?' or 'how close is arrow 1's direction to arrow 2's direction?'

Now what's left after that is 'Why is it so? Why did we decide on this in embeddings?'

[ttoinou]

Agreed. It’s almost like Wildberger‘s rational trigonometry

[Izkata]

"Cosine similarity" includes that particular kind of normalization, it does actually impart more information than "normalized dot product".