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I've been nerdsniped by the idea of Semantic IDs. Here's the result of my training runs: • RQ-VAE to compress item embeddings into tokens • SASRec to predict the next item (i.e., 4-tokens) exactly • Qwen3-8B that can return recs and natural language! eugeneyan.com/writing/sema...

For example, given a sequence of items, it can recommend the next best item. But better than that, you can steer the recommendations with natural language! And it can explain why it gave that recommendation, as well as creatively name recommendation bundles.