Model reference · open weights

bge-small-zh

Embeddings BAAI Embeddings 2 builds Open weights 4.8M dl/mo

bge-small-zh is an open-weight embedding model from BAAI. bge-small-zh (BF16) weighs 96 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • bge-small-zh is a 24M parameter feature extraction model developed by BAAI for mapping Chinese text to dense vectors.
  • It supports retrieval, classification, clustering, and semantic search tasks with a context length of 512 tokens.
  • The model is released under the MIT license.

Summary of the BAAI/bge-small-zh-v1.5 model card, 2026-10-01. The estimate below is for another build of the family.

What it is

Released byBAAI
Released2023-09-12
Parameters24M
VRAM96 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for bge-small-zh (BF16)

96 MBweights, file size
1.1 GBruntime overhead
CardRunsMemory
RTX 3060 12 GBfits11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GBfits15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GBfits31.0 GB
L40S 48 GBfits44.0 GB
A100 80 GBfits78.2 GB
H100 80 GBfits78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GBfits93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unifiedfits107 GB
H200 141 GBfits138 GB
B200 180 GBfits176 GB

Builds

Sizes, precisions & builds

BuildParamsPrecisionWeightsSmallest setup
bge-small-zh-v1.5 ↗ 24MFP32 48 MBRTX 3060 12 GB
bge-small-zh (above) ↗ —BF16 96 MBRTX 3060 12 GB

From the model card

What BAAI says about bge-small-zh

Read the model card

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.

ModelLanguageDescriptionquery instruction for retrieval [1]
BAAI/llm-embedderEnglishInference Fine-tunea unified embedding model to support diverse retrieval augmentation needs for LLMsSee README
BAAI/bge-reranker-largeChinese and EnglishInference Fine-tunea cross-encoder model which is more accurate but less efficient [2]
BAAI/bge-reranker-baseChinese and EnglishInference Fine-tunea cross-encoder model which is more accurate but less efficient [2]
BAAI/bge-large-en-v1.5EnglishInference Fine-tuneversion 1.5 with more reasonable similarity distributionRepresent this sentence for searching relevant passages:
BAAI/bge-base-en-v1.5EnglishInference Fine-tuneversion 1.5 with more reasonable similarity distributionRepresent this sentence for searching relevant passages:
BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5EnglishInference Fine-tuneversion 1.5 with more reasonable similarity distributionRepresent this sentence for searching relevant passages:
BAAI/bge-large-zh-v1.5ChineseInference Fine-tuneversion 1.5 with more reasonable similarity distribution为这个句子生成表示以用于检索相关文章:
BAAI/bge-base-zh-v1.5ChineseInference Fine-tuneversion 1.5 with more reasonable similarity distribution为这个句子生成表示以用于检索相关文章:
BAAI/bge-small-zh-v1.5ChineseInference Fine-tuneversion 1.5 with more reasonable similarity distribution为这个句子生成表示以用于检索相关文章:
BAAI/bge-large-enEnglishInference Fine-tune:trophy: rank 1st in MTEB leaderboardRepresent this sentence for searching relevant passages:
BAAI/bge-base-enEnglishInference Fine-tunea base-scale model but with similar ability to bge-large-enRepresent this sentence for searching relevant passages:
[BAAI/bge-small-en](https://huggingface.co

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

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