Pick embedding models by your use case, not the leaderboard: a practical guide
victorialslocum · x · 2026-09-09
Victoria Slocum revisits her most popular video, "How to choose an embedding model," with unchanged advice: start from your application's requirements, not the top of the leaderboard.
- Identify the use case: modality (text only, text+images, mixed?), languages and domains, retrieval vs. classification vs. clustering vs. reranking, local deployment needs. A general-purpose model is a sensible baseline; domain-specific models suit code/medicine/legal, and fine-tuning comes later.
- Choose a lightweight baseline: use MTEB to survey models by task score, size, memory, dimensions, and max tokens — bigger isn't automatically better.
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