@EricGT thanks for the link. That paper is pretty dense for those who don’t already understand quite a lot about ML.
I think the gist is that, as applied here, HyDE would use an LLM to first create a “made up” answer based on the question. This answer will have the form of a real forum post (for example) but may contain hallucinations and be factually wrong because the content is coming from the LLM not a canonical document set. This document is never shown to the user, but the neat trick is that this document will be semantically similar to real documents/topics in your site. The search returns real documents that are most similar to the “made up” document, and empirically this seems to work better than just matching the raw search term to semantically similar documents in the embeddings database.
@sam Hyde based search sounds cool and excited to try it. Are you envisaging tweak able knobs for some of these ai features? For example, I can imagine it might be nice to edit the prompts used both to generate the hypothetical document and to control the summary/answer. For example, the current chatbot is pretty verbose when it does find answers. It would be nice to be able to add “concisely” or “briefly” as a prefix to the prompt (as I often do when using chatgpt itself).