Generate Embeddings

Lantern supports generating text and image embeddings inside the database. Try it out on Lantern Cloud.

Note that generating embeddings is a compute-intensive task. For large scale embedding generation, such as generating embeddings over all of your data, Lantern provides a separate process.

Open AI Text Embeddings

Before using Open AI text embeddings, you need to have an Open AI API key. You can get one by signing up at Open AI. Once you have an API key, set it as a parameter in Postgres.

ALTER ROLE [YOUR_USERNAME] SET lantern_extras.openai_token='[YOUR_API_KEY]';
SELECT pg_reload_conf();

Use the openai_embedding function to generate text embeddings using the Open AI embedding models. This function accepts a model name and text input as arguments, and for the text-embedding-3-small and text-embedding-3-large models, an optional dimension argument.

SELECT openai_embedding('openai/text-embedding-ada-002', 'My text input');
SELECT openai_embedding('openai/text-embedding-3-large', 'My text input');
SELECT openai_embedding('openai/text-embedding-3-large', 'My text input', 256);

The following embedding models are supported

Cohere Text Embeddings

Before using Cohere text embeddings, you need to have a Cohere API key. You can get one by signing up at Cohere. Once you have an API key, set it as a parameter in Postgres.

ALTER ROLE [YOUR_USERNAME] SET lantern_extras.cohere_token='[YOUR_API_KEY]';
SELECT pg_reload_conf();

To generate an embedding for the text My text input using the Cohere embedding model cohere/embed-english-v3.0, run

SELECT cohere_embedding('cohere/embed-english-v3.0', 'My text input');

The following embedding models are supported

Open-Source Text Embeddings

For example, to generate an embedding for the text My text input using the open-source embedding model BAAI/bge-small-en in SQL, run

SELECT text_embedding('BAAI/bge-small-en', 'My text input');

The following embedding models are supported

Image Embeddings

To generate image embeddings, use the image_embedding function. This function accepts a model name and image URL as arguments.

For example, to generate an embedding for the image https://lantern.dev/images/home/footer.png using the embedding model clip/ViT-B-32-visual, run

SELECT image_embedding('clip/ViT-B-32-visual', 'https://lantern.dev/images/home/footer.png');

The following embedding models are supported

Self-Hosting

For people self-hosting, generating embeddings requires the Lantern Extras extension. Installation steps are found here.

Once the extension is installed, the above functions are available.