Embedding English Wikipedia in under 15 minutes

What this post added

This post details the implementation of a distributed GPU job on Modal to generate text embeddings for the entire English Wikipedia corpus. It covers setting up a Modal app with custom images for Hugging Face's Text Embedding Inference server, utilizing Modal Volumes for dataset persistence, and managing container lifecycles with Modal classes. The solution leverages concurrent requests to the inference server and dynamic batching to achieve efficient embedding generation, reducing the time from hours to under 15 minutes and costing under $15.