EmbeddingGemma 2

(blog.google)

128 points | by ilreb 6 hours ago ago

17 comments

  • simonw an hour ago ago

    I really appreciate that EmbeddingGemma 2 is under the Apache 2.0 license.

    For embedding models in particular, I don't think it makes sense to use a closed, proprietary, hosted-only model.

    Most applications of embedding models involve calculating thousands or even millions of embedding vectors and storing them for later comparison.

    If your model is proprietary, the vendor is likely someday going to decide to stop offering that model. They'll have a better model to replace it, but you still need to pay to re-calculate those millions of stored existing vectors.

    (In April 2024 OpenAI offered to "cover the financial cost of users re-embedding content with these new models" - https://openai.com/index/gpt-4-api-general-availability/ - but I don't think that's something we can rely on from every provider.)

    Notably, I don't want to host the model myself. I'd much rather pay a provider for a hosted model while knowing that if they ever stop hosting it I can run the open weights version myself - or find another vendor who can do that for me.

    • 0xdeafbeef 10 minutes ago ago

      Better to have golden tests. Even switch from cpu to gpu can give you different tokens

  • Nautman 30 minutes ago ago

    It's also very neat that this can be used for "Jev"-like tasks with text and image.

    https://developers.google.com/edge/mediapipe/solutions/decis...

  • aabhay 31 minutes ago ago

    Note that unlike prior on device embedding models, this seems to be trained with MRL, not MatFormers, meaning you don’t get to shrink the model weights alongside the lower dimensional embeddings, unfortunately. Likely there’s not good research for how to do MatFormers for multimodal yet?

  • Juvination 11 minutes ago ago

    So what are some use cases people have found for running these sized multimodals on their device? What is it accurate on, and what is the hallucination rate like?

    • minimaxir 5 minutes ago ago

      The main one is mapping images to text and visa versa, e.g. semantic search of images via text, where the images are encoded and the text question is encoded with the same model, then finding nearest neighbors.

  • dcl 37 minutes ago ago

    Would be good to see how it compares to the embedding models from https://www.voyageai.com/ for text. I have used these a few times in the past and have found them superior to the Qwen models compared to here.

    • nostrebored 26 minutes ago ago

      It's been awhile since I've been in the space, but Voyage was never a serious contender outside of super-niche business domains. I suspect that this compares favorably in 9X% of use cases

  • sourcecodeplz 22 minutes ago ago

    for text, benchmarks are identical to the first EmbeddingGemma.

    but you can use this new one and enable/disable what you don't need.

    can keep only text for ex.

  • minimaxir 5 hours ago ago

    Finally. I was getting annoyed that there's been an inflection point in how LLMs/agents work but there hasn't been a good moderate-size embeddings model, and this one is multimodal too! 270M for text only is great compared to older embedding models, and a total 440M for text + vision is also fair.

    I also may or may not have a tool for much faster local embedding creation that I calibrated for EmbeddingGemma but didn't want to release until a better embedding model came along.

    • alberto467 an hour ago ago

      Not just vision with video, but also audio, it really seems amazing.

      I’m not sure how it can handle vicinity of pairs of embeddings with for example some words and the audio where they’re spoken or an image where the text is handled. Building local multimodal search with this would be amazing. I’ve explored this stuff with CLIP and it’s interesting how image (but also audio) embedding carries both the clean “text” content information but also the stylistic and visual/audio tone information, the two can even kind of be linearly separated.

  • flockonus an hour ago ago

    Hats off to google for offering OSS (or at least open weights + license) a model that would be probably pretty closed to what they would ship in their Android phones.

  • djoldman 44 minutes ago ago

    Parameter count split is interesting:

    740M total (270M text, 170M vision, 300M audio)

    • onlyrealcuzzo 36 minutes ago ago

      Makes sense...

      Vision is just processing a still image (why it's by far the smallest). Text requires dealing with the entropy of human language. Audio is meaningless without time.

  • nowittyusername an hour ago ago

    I'm considering adding this in my harness after some testing, this seems like a really nice embedding model!

  • brokensegue an hour ago ago

    why isn't this being compared to siglip2 (also from google)? because that one isn't fully multimodal? or because it's a different org/team?

  • sohamactive 33 minutes ago ago

    rag transformations would be legendary