My lab found a way to migrate between embedding models with zero downtime. [R]

Excerpt

So I've been messinga round with embedding models for a bit, and I think they are interesting enough to experiment with. They are useful for rag, especially in a localllm sense because you can ground your answers in truth. But what happens if you have a billion documents, and you decide to upgrade your model to a "better" one? on an h100, that would take about 108 days, just to upgrade the vectors so u can start serving again (tested qwen embed 8b on h100). Even if you aren't doing 1b vectors, a