Do nodes in List Index come with embedding vectors in LlamaIndex?

Question

One can run an embedding-based query on List Index (link). For that nodes in the List Index should be supplied with embedding vectors. What is then the difference between the List Index and the Vector Store Index? I thought that the distinctive feature of the Vector Store Index is that it assigns an embedding vector to each nodes in the index but it looks like List Index does the same.

Answer 1

The documentation on how embeddings are generated says that for list indices embeddings are only created (and then cached) if mode="embedding" is used at the time of the query. No embeddings are generated when the index is first created. Vector store indices do the embedding during creation.

Not sure if there's any difference under the hood once embeddings are available in a list index after the first query though.