What is faiss actually used for?

[lambdaofgod]

First of all, let me thank you for providing this code. I don't often see such research-related code of such quality.

I see that faiss is only used in collection_indexer.

Because of my experience of running into all kinds of nasty bugs with faiss I'd like to consider removing it from dependencies.

Is my understanding right that removing faiss would only require replacing compute_faiss_kmeans?

Of course if I get to it I'd leave faiss kmeans but I'll add alternative kmeans implementation that will be used when it's specified in config.

[santhnm2]

This is correct, FAISS is only used for the k-means computation.