Simon Willison’s Weblog

Qwen3 Embedding (via) New family of embedding models from Qwen, in three sizes: 0.6B, 4B, 8B - and two categories: Text Embedding and Text Reranking.

The full collection can be browsed on Hugging Face. The smallest available model is the 0.6B Q8 one, which is available as a 639MB GGUF. I tried it out using my llm-sentence-transformers plugin like this:

llm install llm-sentence-transformers
llm sentence-transformers register Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B
llm embed -m sentence-transformers/Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B -c hi | jq length

This output 1024, confirming that Qwen3 0.6B produces 1024 length embedding vectors.

These new models are the highest scoring open-weight models on the well regarded MTEB leaderboard - they're licensed Apache 2.0.

You can also try them out in your web browser, thanks to a Transformers.js port of the models. I loaded this page in Chrome and it fetched 560MB of model files and gave me an interactive interface for visualizing clusters of embeddings like this: