Model reference · open weights

clip-V-B-16

Available as managed deployment Embeddings sentence-transformers Embeddings 1 variants 0 dl/mo

clip-V-B-16 is an open-weight embedding model from sentence-transformers. AxForge deploys and operates it for you on dedicated EU-owned hardware — with the licence handled where one is required.

Available as managed deployment — configured and operated for you on dedicated EU hardware, quoted per deployment.

What it is

Makersentence-transformers
TypeEmbedding models
TaskEmbeddings
Runs withsentence-transformers
Released2022-04-12
Popularity0 downloads / month
LicenceUnknown

About

What clip-V-B-16 is

This is the Image & Text model CLIP, which maps text and images to a shared vector space. For applications of the models, have a look in our documentation SBERT.net - Image Search

Usage

After installing sentence-transformers (pip install sentence-transformers), the usage of this model is easy:

from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer, util
from PIL import Image

#Load CLIP model
model = SentenceTransformer('clip-ViT-B-16')

#Encode an image:
img_emb = model.encode(Image.open('two_dogs_in_snow.jpg'))

#Encode text descriptions
text_emb = model.encode(['Two dogs in the snow', 'A cat on a table', 'A picture of London at night'])

#Compute cosine similarities
cos_scores = util.cos_sim(img_emb, text_emb)
print(cos_scores)

See our SBERT.net - Image Search documentation for more examples how the model can be used for image search, zero-shot image classification, image clustering and image deduplication.

Performance

In the following table we find the zero-shot ImageNet validation set accuracy:

ModelTop 1 Performance
clip-ViT-B-3263.3
clip-ViT-B-1668.1
clip-ViT-L-1475.4

For a multilingual version of the CLIP model for 50+ languages have a look at: clip-ViT-B-32-multilingual-v1

From the published model card. Full card on the HuggingFace links in the sidebar.

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.

Using it via the API

Call it like any OpenAI endpoint

Once AxForge deploys clip-v-b-16 for you, it answers on the OpenAI-compatible API — the same base URL and keys as every other model. (clip-v-b-16 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":"clip-v-b-16","input":"text to embed"}'

Create an account — your API key is available in the console. 5M tokens/month currently included with every new account at launch.

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