Comment by SadErn

Microsoft also seems to be working in this space. They recently released this:

https://huggingface.co/microsoft/bitnet-embedding-0.6b

It’s a small multilingual embedding model designed for things like search, RAG, and semantic similarity. It supports a fairly large context window and is designed to run efficiently on a CPU in a GPU starved world.

The interesting part is that it builds on BitNet, using ternary weights of -1, 0, and 1 instead of the usual floating-point weights. That should make indexing and searching large amounts of text much cheaper without giving up too much accuracy.