Ask HN: Best Embedding Models?

18 points by devstein ↗ HN
Hey HN, which embedding models are people using? There has been so much development around foundational LLMs, but haven't seen much news about embedding models.

16 comments

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I've liked qwen and embeddinggemma for local search. Qwen because 32K is enough to basically fit a whole page into the context window and embeddiggemma because it's crazy efficient.
embeddings are easy to fine tune. Try modern bert.
I’m partial to jina.ai — they have open models for code and prose, all easily runnable locally.
Feels like embeddings are underrated compared to LLM's hype, but they doing great.
I’ve been using MixedBread, which is a pretty old model at this point. Recently, I tried comparing it to some newer models and was disappointed that the results weren’t dramatically and uniformly better.

You probably can’t go wrong if you pick a recent one that scores decently well on benchmarks and is at the right price point (or memory requirement) for whatever you’re trying to do.

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Just fyi, for RAG/similarity search, adding a reranker was much bigger pay off than switching embedding models.
Cohere's embed-v4.0 is my daily driver as far as a high performance model is concerned. I do a lot of cluster analysis and data visualization and I like that there's an `input_type="clustering"` mode in addition to the standard `input_type="search"` mode.

For a fast, open, and local model, I've found it hard to beat https://huggingface.co/sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v...

Meta's Perception Encoder Audio-Visual, its CLIP like but has three modality: Audio, Video and Text
please check OpenAI embedding models - especially small one
not a single "of what data" or "in what env"

best in what?