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How do you operate a multi-vector (ColBERT-style) index in production without it blowing up storage?

Late interaction stores one vector per token, so a corpus that fit in a few GB as single vectors can balloon 100x. The signal is knowing the compression and indexing tricks (centroids, residuals, PLAID) that make multi-vector retrieval shippable.

Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Applied AI Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.

Late interaction stores one vector per token, so a corpus that fit in a few GB as single vectors can balloon 100x. The signal is knowing the compression and indexing tricks (centroids, residuals, PLAID) that make multi-vector retrieval shippable.

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