mahjongmen
Joined 3 years ago
Joined 3 years ago
Drop me an email at [email protected]
We actually did internally run benchmarks against your models since they are open-weights - however, when looking at the license on the 3bn multimodal model (https://huggingface.co/nomic-ai/nomic-embed-multimodal-3b/bl...) we're not permitted to include the results for the marketing of products/services. Rest assured, we know how our model stacks up against yours :)
In any-case, we didn't publish evals on only Vidore-V2 but we did benchmark on it internally.
Thanks for engaging! Apologies for the delay but HN seems to have throttled my account from posting so I'm answering as fast as I can (or they will let me).
You're right in the sense that I could wake up tomorrow and Cohere could lay me off, fire me, or I could quit! All of these are possible statements, but the reason I don't want to publicly commit particularly on our policy on Open Sourcing our models if our business is a going concern or if we deprecate our models is as follows:
1) Cohere is not a going concern 2) I haven't thought about deprecating any of our embedding models because of the reason that simonw stated!
I wouldn't say I'm a Cohere employee playing PR - I'm responsible for all the search and embedding models and products at Cohere and I care deeply on how our users perceive, understand and user our models/products. I'm actually really excited that there is so much engagement this time around (a far cry from 2021 - when I started).
For reference in terms of policies: For our SaaS API, I wrote our model deprecation policy (https://docs.cohere.com/docs/deprecations) and had only deprecated our Rerank-v2.0 Models largely because they were stateless
Again - happy for all the engagement. Heard on the things we can improve on!
That being said, since I do manage our Search and Retrieval offering, if we were to deprecate any of our embedding models (which is generally the risk of closed-source models), I will make sure that there is an "escape hatch" for users.
Heard on what your concerns are though :)
While we benchmarked internally, on BEIR, we opted not to report our model onto MTEB for the following reason:
1) MTEB has been gamed - if you look at this model (https://huggingface.co/voyageai/voyage-3-m-exp) on the MTEB leaderboard, its an intermediate checkpoint of Voyage-3-Large where they finetuned it on datasets that represent MTEB datasets.
2) If you look at the recent datasets in MMTEB, you'll find that it has quite a lot of machine translated or "weird" datasets that are quite noisy
In general, for our Search Models, we benchmark on these public academic datasets but we definitely do not try to hillclimb in this direction as we find it has little correlation with real use-cases
Voyage-3-large is a text-only and much larger model than Embed-v4. If you want to unlock multimodality with Voyage-3-large, you'd have to either OCR (really bad results usually) or use a VLM to parse your data into textual descriptions (this works alright, but the cost of using a VLM will jack-up your data-pre-processing costs).
Since we focus on Enterprise use-cases, we made sure to include training data from domains like you mentioned above. While in very specific use-cases finetuning may be helpful, but we also do offer that as a customization service (just not available via SaaS)
Elliott here from Cohere.
We benchmarked against Nomic's models on our consortium of datasets ranging from text-only, image-only, and mixed modalities. Without publishing additional benchmarks, I am confident in saying that our model is more performant.
At Cohere, for our embed models, we have not deprecated any of our embedding models since we started (I know because I've been there that long) and if we were to start doing so, I would take into account the worry of ensuring our users have a way of accessing our models.
One aspect here that isn't factored is also efficiency. Yes there might be strong open weight models but if you're punching at the 7bn+ weight class your serving requirements are vastly different from a throughput efficiency perspective (also your query-inference speed).
All food for thought. That being said, if for your use-case, Nomic Embed Vision 1.5 is better than Embed-v4.0, happy to hop on a call to discuss where the differential may be.