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GTE

Alibaba Cloud
open weights / Overall score: 4.0(strong)

GTE (General Text Embedding) covers embedding and reranking for multilingual and long-document retrieval. gte-multilingual-base handles more than 70 languages at 8,192 tokens from a 305M-parameter encoder and emits sparse token weights alongside dense vectors; the ModernBERT-based embedder and cross-encoder reranker target English long documents, and the gte-Qwen2 instruct checkpoints are decoder-based variants. Alibaba's NLP group publishes the family.

Scored over the Alibaba-NLP account. The original v1 encoders published under the thenlper account add about 2.0M downloads a month and do not move the adoption band. The gme-Qwen2-VL checkpoints are a separate multimodal line. Verified 2026-09-11 via the Hugging Face model cards and the Hub API.

Openness

3 high confidence
3.0
weights
open(Apache-2.0 ungated checkpoints across the multilingual, ModernBERT and Qwen2-based tiers)
data
closed(the cards point at the mGTE paper for the training mixture and release no corpus)
code
partial(a gte_embedding.py inference script ships in the model repository
license
Apache-2.0(OSI)

The category center of gravity: an OSI license over ungated weights with the corpus and the training run kept in the paper. The Qwen2-derived checkpoints carry Apache-2.0 rather than the Qwen license, so no restrictive SKU pulls the family down.

Adoption

4 high confidence
4.0

3,743,441 downloads in the trailing 30 days across the gte EMBEDDING checkpoints in the Alibaba-NLP account, led by gte-multilingual-base at 1,307,627. The two reranker checkpoints are deliberately excluded: they draw a further 3,221,049 and are scored separately as `gte-reranker`, so the earlier reading of this record - all 11 gte-prefixed repos at 6,964,490 - billed the same downloads to two products. The band is 4 either way. The superseded v1 encoders under the `thenlper` account add roughly 1.99M more and are also excluded, being a different publishing account.

Capability

4 high confidence
4.0

Current generation on both halves of the pipeline: the highest BEIR average among the sub-1B models in the table it publishes, long-context throughout, and a multilingual encoder beside the English one. Short of the leader, which is measured on MMTEB rather than BEIR. The reranker half of the GTE line is scored separately as `gte-reranker`; this record cites only the embedding checkpoints, after an earlier reading derived both its score and its downloads from the reranker card.

Verified 2026-09-11