Model reference · open weights

bge-small-zh

bge-small-zh is an open-weight embedding model from BAAI, listed in the AxForge catalogue. AxForge can bring it up on EU-owned hardware for you on request — with the licence handled where one is required.

Embeddings BAAI 2 variants 4.8M downloads/mo
Request this model on EU hardware All served models Not on the shared API today — deployed on request.

About

What bge-small-zh is

More details please refer to our Github: FlagEmbedding. English | 中文 FlagEmbedding can map any text to a low-dimensional dense vector which can be used for tasks like retrieval, classification, clustering, or semantic search. And it also can be used in vector databases for LLMs. 🌟Updates🌟 - 10/12/2023: Release LLM-Embedder, a unified embedding model to support diverse retrieval augmentation needs for LLMs. Paper :fire: - 09/15/2023: The technical report of BGE has been released - 09/15/2023: The masive training data of BGE has been released - 09/12/2023: New models: - New reranker model: release cross-encoder models BAAI/bge-reranker-base and BAAI/bge-reranker-large, which are more powerful than embedding model. We recommend to use/fine-tune them to re-rank top-k documents returned by embedding models. - update embedding model: release bge--v1.5 embedding model to alleviate the issue of the similarity distribution, and enhance its retrieval ability without instruction. - 09/07/2023: Update fine-tune code: Add script to mine hard negatives and support adding instruction during fine-tuning. - 08/09/2023: BGE Models are integrated into Langchain, you can use it like this; C-MTEB leaderboard is available. - 08/05/2023: Release base-scale and small-scale models, best performance among the models of the same size 🤗 - 08/02/2023: Release bge-large-(short for BAAI General Embedding) Models, rank 1st on MTEB and C-MTEB benchmark! :tada: :tada: - 08/01/2023: We release the Chinese Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (C-MTEB), consisting of 31 test dataset. Model List bge is short for BAAI general embedding. [1\]: If you need to search the relevant passages to a query, we suggest to add the instruction to the query; in other cases, no instruction is needed, just use the original query directly. In all cases, no instruction needs to be added to passages. [2\]: Different from embedding model, reranker uses question and document as input and directly output similarity instead of embedding. To balance the accuracy and time cost, cross-encoder is widely used to re-rank top-k documents retrieved by other simple models. For examples, use bge embedding model to retrieve top 100 relev

Summarised from the published model card. Read the full card on the HuggingFace links below.

Specifications

What it is

MakerBAAI
TypeEmbedding models
Parameters (lead)24M
Context512 tokens
Variants2
Runs withtransformers
Released2023-09-12
Popularity4.8M downloads / month
Likes138
LicenceOpen weights

How it works

How embedding models work

Your textsentence / documentEncodermaps meaningVectorlist of numbersAn embedding model turns text into a vector, so similar meanings sit close together — the basis of search and RAG.

Variants

Sizes & precisions

Open weights ship in several sizes and precisions. One page, all the variants — pick the one that fits your GPU. VRAM figures are estimates from model size.

VariantParamsPrecisionVRAMFits 16 GBWeights
bge-small-zh-v1.524MBF16~0.1 GBWeights ↗
bge-small-zhBF16Weights ↗

Using it via the API

Call it like any OpenAI endpoint

Once AxForge deploys bge-small-zh for you, it answers on the OpenAI-compatible API — the same base URL and keys as every other model. (bge-small-zh below is illustrative; you get the exact model name on deployment.)

$ curl -sS https://api.axforge.ai/v1/embeddings \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AXFORGE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"bge-small-zh","input":"text to embed"}'

Details

Languages, data & research

Languages

zh

Tags

transformers pytorch safetensors bert feature-extraction zh text-embeddings-inference endpoints_compatible deploy:azure

Papers

Licence

Open weights

Open weights under mit — commercial use is permitted. Deploy it on AxForge EU hardware on request. Read the licence ↗

Sources

Weights & code

Want bge-small-zh on EU-owned hardware?

Request this model on EU hardware See what’s served now

Explore

More embedding models

© 2026 AxForge · EU-hosted AI infrastructure Pricing Docs Trust Privacy Terms