Simon Willison’s Weblog
Comment My comment on EmbeddingGemma 2 — Hacker News
I really appreciate that EmbeddingGemma 2 is under the Apache 2.0 license.
For embedding models in particular, I don't think it makes sense to use a closed, proprietary, hosted-only model.
Most applications of embedding models involve calculating thousands or even millions of embedding vectors and storing them for later comparison.
If your model is proprietary, the vendor is likely someday going to decide to stop offering that model. They'll have a better model to replace it, but you still need to pay to re-calculate those millions of stored existing vectors.
(In April 2024 OpenAI offered to "cover the financial cost of users re-embedding content with these new models" - https://openai.com/index/gpt-4-api-general-availability/ - but I don't think that's something we can rely on from every provider.)
Notably, I don't want to host the model myself . I'd much rather pay a provider for a hosted model while knowing that if they ever stop hosting it I can run the open weights version myself - or find another vendor who can do that for me.
Recent articles
We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything - 3rd October 2026
OpenAI DevDay 2026 live blog - 29th September 2026
2026 in LLMs (so far) - 27th September 2026
This is a beat by Simon Willison, posted on 6th October 2026 .
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