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Fast vector similarity search at billion scale.

Skill metadata

Reference: full SKILL.md

The following is the complete skill definition that Mibyan loads when this skill is triggered. This is what the agent sees as instructions when the skill is active.

FAISS - Efficient Similarity Search

Facebook AI’s library for billion-scale vector similarity search.

When to use FAISS

Use FAISS when:
  • Need fast similarity search on large vector datasets (millions/billions)
  • GPU acceleration required
  • Pure vector similarity (no metadata filtering needed)
  • High throughput, low latency critical
  • Offline/batch processing of embeddings
Metrics:
  • 31,700+ GitHub stars
  • Meta/Facebook AI Research
  • Handles billions of vectors
  • C++ with Python bindings
Use alternatives instead:
  • Chroma/Pinecone: Need metadata filtering
  • Weaviate: Need full database features
  • Annoy: Simpler, fewer features

Quick start

Installation

Basic usage

Index types

2. IVF (inverted file) - Fast approximate

3. HNSW (Hierarchical NSW) - Best quality/speed

4. Product Quantization - Memory efficient

Save and load

GPU acceleration

LangChain integration

LlamaIndex integration

Best practices

  1. Choose right index type - Flat for <10K, IVF for 10K-1M, HNSW for quality
  2. Normalize for cosine - Use IndexFlatIP with normalized vectors
  3. Use GPU for large datasets - 10-100× faster
  4. Save trained indices - Training is expensive
  5. Tune nprobe/ef_search - Balance speed/accuracy
  6. Monitor memory - PQ for large datasets
  7. Batch queries - Better GPU utilization

Performance

Resources