Sentence Transformers maintainer: stop using all-MiniLM-L6-v2, it's leaving performance on the table

tomaarsen · x · 2026-09-16

Sentence Transformers author tomaarsen reacted to all-MiniLM-L6-v2 trending on Hugging Face with a blunt note: it's a 2021 model and you're leaving performance on the table. In follow-ups he suggests newer, smaller alternatives like IBM's granite-embedding-30m-english and Snowflake's snowflake-arctic-embed-s, points to the 26,221 sentence-transformers-compatible models on HF, and advises starting from the MTEB leaderboard but ultimately evaluating on your own data before picking one.

Related event: Sentence Transformers maintainer urges users to move on from aging all-MiniLM-L6-v2(2 posts)→

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