Why does Gaurav Sen say semantic chunking is slow at scale?

Gaurav Sen says a semantic chunker splits documents and then computes similarity scores between the chunks, repeating that work many times. That makes it slow when there are many documents, so although it sounds good in theory, he says it does not hold up in practice at scale and is the likely bottleneck when uploads are slow.

• Gaurav Sen lists the upload stages as parsing, chunking, embedding and storing vectors in the database.

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on Gaurav Sen (2026-10-05). Read the whole episode summary →

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