Production RAG: what I learned from processing 5M+ documents

I find it interesting that so many services and tools were investigated except for embedding models. I would have thought that's one of the biggest levers.

they just grabbed the better one (3-large) right off the bat. 6x cost to 3-small, but it's still tiny.

But the model is like 18 months old. and recently we've seen big leaps on MTEB. Not sure how well those translate to reality, but I'm a little surpised this wasn't worth looking into.

i'd go with qwen embedding 3, gemini embeddings or something from mixedbread