Arctic Embed
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Arctic Embed is a family of retrieval embedding models sized from xs to l. The 2.0 releases build on the BGE-M3 RetroMAE backbone to handle multilingual retrieval at up to 8,192 tokens without giving up English quality. Matryoshka representation learning and quantization-aware training let a vector be truncated to 256 dimensions or compressed to 128 bytes per document. Snowflake develops and publishes the family.
The v1 xs checkpoint carries no license field on the Hub while every other family member and the family card declare Apache-2.0; the score records Apache-2.0 on the card's family-wide statement. Verified 2026-09-11 via the Hugging Face model cards, the Hub API and the arctic-embed repository README.
Openness
3 high confidence- weights
- open(ungated checkpoints at xs, s, m, m-long, m-v1.5, l, m-v2.0 and l-v2.0)
- data
- closed(described only as roughly 400M pairs mixing public datasets with proprietary web-search data, then about 1M mined triplets
- code
- partial(the arctic-embed repository ships inference and embedding-compression notebooks, not a training pipeline)
- license
- Apache-2.0(OSI)
Open weights under an OSI license with a closed corpus. The proprietary web-search half of the pretraining mixture is what rules out the data rung outright, and the public repository stops at inference and compression examples. The xs checkpoint ships without a license field on its card, and is read as Apache-2.0 on the family statement rather than left unmapped.
- https://huggingface.co/api/models/Snowflake/snowflake-arctic-embed-l-v2.0 recorded 2026-09-11
license: apache-2.0; gated: false; private: false; downloadable checkpoint files present.
- https://huggingface.co/api/models/Snowflake/snowflake-arctic-embed-m-v2.0 recorded 2026-09-11
license: apache-2.0; gated: false; private: false.
- https://huggingface.co/api/models/Snowflake/snowflake-arctic-embed-s recorded 2026-09-11
license: apache-2.0; gated: false; private: false.
- https://huggingface.co/api/models/Snowflake/snowflake-arctic-embed-xs recorded 2026-09-11
gated: false; private: false; no license field and no license tag on the v1 xs checkpoint.
- https://huggingface.co/Snowflake/snowflake-arctic-embed-l-v2.0/raw/main/README.md recorded 2026-09-11
States "Arctic is licensed under the Apache-2. The released models can be used for commercial purposes free of charge."
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Snowflake-Labs/arctic-embed/main/README.md recorded 2026-09-11
Describes pretraining on about 400m samples of "a mix of public datasets and proprietary web search data" followed by about 1m mined triplets, and offers inference and quantization notebooks rather than training code.
Adoption
4 high confidence821,744 downloads in the trailing 30 days for snowflake-arctic-embed-l-v2.0, 590,982 for the s checkpoint and 397,003 for m. The Hugging Face universe sweep puts the eight shipped arctic-embed checkpoints at 2,705,158 combined.
- https://huggingface.co/api/models/Snowflake/snowflake-arctic-embed-l-v2.0 recorded 2026-09-11
downloads: 821744.
- https://huggingface.co/api/models/Snowflake/snowflake-arctic-embed-s recorded 2026-09-11
downloads: 590982.
- https://huggingface.co/api/models/Snowflake/snowflake-arctic-embed-m recorded 2026-09-11
downloads: 397003.
Capability
4 high confidenceCompetitive frontier: multilingual and long-context, and the published table has it ahead of bge-m3 and gte-multilingual-base on English BEIR and on CLEF while staying level on MIRACL. Placed a rung under the leader because the numbers are BEIR and CLEF rather than MMTEB, and because the line has not shipped since the 2.0 release.
- https://huggingface.co/Snowflake/snowflake-arctic-embed-l-v2.0/raw/main/README.md recorded 2026-09-11
Quality table gives snowflake-arctic-l-v2.0 BEIR (15) 55.6, MIRACL (4) 55.8, CLEF (Focused) 52.9 and CLEF (Full) 54.3 average NDCG@10, against 48.8 / 56.8 / 40.8 / 41.3 for bge-m3 and 51.1 / 52.3 / 47.7 / 53.1 for gte; truncation to 256 dimensions costs under 3%.
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Snowflake-Labs/arctic-embed/main/README.md recorded 2026-09-11
Records the 12/04/2024 release of the l-v2.0 and m-v2.0 multilingual models as the most recent additions to the family.
Verified 2026-09-11