mteb-embedding-size-range

IN premise — summaries/2026/08/24/muennighoff-2022-mteb-s4-results.md

Created 2026-08-25T02:58:21+00:00

MTEB embedding sizes range from 1.2 kB per example (GloVe/Komninos) to 16.4 kB per example (SGPT-5.8B)

Summary

The MTEB benchmark covers text encoders whose per-example output varies by more than an order of magnitude, from roughly 1 kilobyte up to about 16 kilobytes. This spread matters because any pipeline, memory budget, or storage estimate that handles these models needs to account for a roughly 14x difference in footprint, so sizing assumptions can't be one-size-fits-all.