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TIL that Chrome ships an internal embedding model, interesting!

It's a shame that it's not open source, unlikely that there's anything super proprietary in an embeddings model that's optimized to run on CPU.

(I'd use it if it were released; in the meantime, MiniLM-L6-v2 works reasonably well. https://brokk.ai/blog/brokk-under-the-hood)

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Agreed! On open source though - can't you just pull the model and use the weights? I confess I have no idea what the licensing would be for an open source-backed browser deploying weights, but it seems like unless you made a huge amount of money off it, it would be unproblematic, and even then could be just fine.

Sure you could but now you have two identical models running in the browser, one of which needs to be loaded in.

Ideally they would expose the model via a browser api like they do for the prompt api.

FWIW I asked someone on the chrome team about this and they don’t plan to expose native embedding APIs citing lack of dimensionality standards as the reason.

you need to know its architecture to run inference against it

possibly this is buried in the Chromium source if it's part of the OSS personality, if not difficulty of reverse engineering would be pretty high

Apparently, it’s for fighting scams: https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/how-were-usin...

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