diff --git a/lib/shared/tokenizer/tokenizer.rb b/lib/shared/tokenizer/tokenizer.rb
index c7afeb0a..fc66c4e7 100644
--- a/lib/shared/tokenizer/tokenizer.rb
+++ b/lib/shared/tokenizer/tokenizer.rb
@@ -14,6 +14,9 @@ module DiscourseAi
         tokenize(text).size
       end
       def self.truncate(text, max_length)
+        # Fast track the common case where the text is already short enough.
+        return text if text.size < max_length
+
         tokenizer.decode(tokenizer.encode(text).ids.take(max_length))
       end
     end
@@ -42,6 +45,9 @@ module DiscourseAi
       end
 
       def self.truncate(text, max_length)
+        # Fast track the common case where the text is already short enough.
+        return text if text.size < max_length
+
         tokenizer.decode(tokenize(text).take(max_length))
       end
     end
diff --git a/lib/tasks/modules/embeddings/database.rake b/lib/tasks/modules/embeddings/database.rake
index a0ea1935..fccb1592 100644
--- a/lib/tasks/modules/embeddings/database.rake
+++ b/lib/tasks/modules/embeddings/database.rake
@@ -17,7 +17,7 @@ task "ai:embeddings:create_table" => [:environment] do
 end
 
 desc "Backfill embeddings for all topics"
-task "ai:embeddings:backfill", [:start_topic] => [:environment] do
+task "ai:embeddings:backfill", [:start_topic] => [:environment] do |_, args|
   public_categories = Category.where(read_restricted: false).pluck(:id)
   topic_embeddings = DiscourseAi::Embeddings::Topic.new
   Topic