[mhuffman]

IMHO it depends on the types of things you are recommending. If you have a good way of accurately and specifically textually classifying items it is hard to beat the performance of good old-fashioned embeddings and vector search/ANN. There are plenty of embeddings that do not need GPU like the newer LLM-based ones all crave. Word2Vec, GloVe, and FastText are all high-performance and you wouldn't need GPUs. There are plenty of vector-search libraries that are high-performance and predate the vector-db popularity of late, so also would not depend on GPUs to be high-performance. Most are memory-hungry however, so something to keep in mind. That performance, especially with the embeddings, will come at the cost of loss of some context. No free lunch.