llm/docs/embeddings/binary.md

(embeddings-binary)=

Embedding storage format

The default output format of the llm embed command is a JSON array of floating point numbers.

LLM stores embeddings in space-efficient format: a little-endian binary sequences of 32-bit floating point numbers, each represented using 4 bytes.

These are stored in a BLOB column in a SQLite database.

The following Python functions can be used to convert between this format and an array of floating point numbers:

import struct

def encode(values):
    return struct.pack("<" + "f" * len(values), *values)

def decode(binary):
    return struct.unpack("<" + "f" * (len(binary) // 4), binary)