Thanks! I should have been clearer -- embeddings are pretty fast (relatively) -- it's inference that's slow (I'm at 5 tokens/second on AKS).
https://ollama.com models also works really well on most modern hardware
And as to sidestepping inference, I can totally do that. But I think it's so much better to be able to ask the LLM a question, run a vector similarity search to pull relevant content, and then have the LLM summarize this all in a way that answers my question.