#Search

AIPerplexity is open-sourcing pplx-embed-v2-late, multi-vector embedding models for text and images in one shared space, in 9B and 0.6B sizes. The 9B model can index multimodal data, the 0.6B model can run queries on device, and PDF pages can be searched without OCR. The author reports 92.4% on MADQA and 64% on BrowseComp+, with weights available on Hugging Face.

AIGoogle DeepMind has released EmbeddingGemma 2, an open 740 million parameter model that maps text, images, audio, and video into one embedding space. It is built on the Gemma 4 architecture under an Apache 2.0 license and supports an 8K token context window. The company reports a code benchmark gain from 68.76 to 78.68 on MTEB Code and says the model can run on-device with about 567MB of active RAM for the full multimodal version on a Google Pixel 11 Pro.

Why it matters: The release shows how a 740M-parameter embedding model can cover text, code, images, audio, and video on local hardware, with memory and storage figures to compare against other on-device options.

AIAi2 released AstaBrief 8B, a model that turns a research question and retrieved literature excerpts into a cited report, along with its training data. In Asta's Generate a report feature, Fast mode averages 51.1 seconds per report versus 178.5 seconds for Thinking mode, about 3.5x faster. The model is built on Qwen3-8B with supervised fine-tuning and DPO, and institutions can run its open weights on their own infrastructure.

Why it matters: The post explains the data filtering and one-pass generation choices behind a fast open-weights report model, showing what worked and what did not.

AIPerplexity has published the pplx-embed-v2-context-9b-preview model on Hugging Face. The post links to the model page but gives no further details on its capabilities, benchmarks, or pricing.

AIAlibaba NLP has released UEmbed-4B, a decoder-only multimodal embedding model built on Qwen3.5 4B that outputs both dense and sparse embeddings from one forward pass. It handles text, image, video, and mixed-modal inputs for retrieval and visual-document search, and sparse activations map to vocabulary terms usable with inverted indexes. The model is available on Hugging Face in a family that also includes 2B and 9B variants.

AIBaidu's PaddlePaddle account announced ERNIE 5.1, which it says cuts total parameters to about one-third and activated parameters to about one-half, using roughly 6% of the pretraining cost of models at similar scale. The post reports benchmark results including 99.6 on AIME26 with tools, surpassing DeepSeek-V4-Pro on τ3-bench and SpreadsheetBench-Verified, and ranking #4 globally on Arena Search. ERNIE 5.1 is available through the ERNIE website and Baidu AI Studio Model Playground.

AIAlibaba NLP released LaSER-Qwen3-8B, an 8B-parameter dense retriever built on Qwen/Qwen3-8B that internalizes explicit reasoning into latent space through continuous latent thinking tokens. The model scores 29.3 nDCG@10 on the BRIGHT benchmark, ahead of the rewrite-then-retrieve pipeline's 28.1, and carries a 4096-dimension embedding with an 8192-token maximum sequence length. It is licensed under MIT and adds about 1.7× latency over standard single-pass dense retrievers.