Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Model2Vec: make sentence transformers 500x faster on CPU, 15x smaller

Hi HN! We (Thomas and Stéphan, hello!) recently released Model2Vec, a Python library for distilling any sentence transformer into a small set of static embeddings. This makes inference with such a model up to 500x faster, and reduces model size by a factor of 15 (7.5M params or 15/30MB on disk, depending on whether you use float16 or float32). This allows you to embed 50-100k documents per second on a cpu on a macbook. This reduction of course comes at a cost: distilled models are worse than their parent models. Even so, they are actually a lot better than large sets of conventional…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. Model2Vec: make sentence transformers 500x faster on CPU, 15x smaller launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

1
Model2Vec: make sentence transformers 500x faster on CPU, 15x smaller▲6
Hi HN! We (Thomas and Stéphan, hello!) recently released Model2Vec, a Python library for distilling any sentence transformer into a small set of static embeddings. This makes inference with such a model up to 500x faster, and reduces model size by a factor of 15 (7.5M params or 15/30MB on disk, depending on whether you use float16 or float32). This reduction of course comes at a cost: distilled models are a lot worse than their parent models. Even so, they are actually a lot better than large sets of conventional static embeddings, such as GLoVe or word2vec-based models, which are many…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
2
Model2vec – Lightning-fast Static Embeddings for RAG/Semantic Search▲28
We’ve recently open-sourced Model2vec, a method to distill sentence transformers into static embeddings that outperform all previous approaches by a large margin on MTEB. Our new models set a new state-of-the-art for static embeddings. Main features: - Our best model (potion-base-8M) has only 8M parameters, which is ~30mb on disk - Inference is ~500x faster than the distilled base model (bge-base), on a CPU - New models can be distilled in 30 seconds on a CPU without requiring a dataset - just a vocabulary - Numpy-only inference: The packaged can be install the package with minimal…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
3
Model2vec-Rs – Fast Static Text Embeddings in Rust▲60
Hey HN! We’ve just open-sourced model2vec-rs, a Rust crate for loading and running Model2Vec static embedding models with zero Python dependency. This allows you to embed text at (very) high throughput; for example, in a Rust-based microservice or CLI tool. This can be used for semantic search, retrieval, RAG, or any other text embedding usecase. Main Features: - Rust-native inference: Load any Model2Vec model from Hugging Face or your local path with StaticModel::from_pretrained(...). - Tiny footprint: The crate itself is only ~1.7 mb, with embedding models between 7 and 30 mb. Performance:…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
4
I built a tiny LLM to demystify how language models work▲915
Built a ~9M param LLM from scratch to understand how they actually work. Vanilla transformer, 60K synthetic conversations, ~130 lines of PyTorch. Trains in 5 min on a free Colab T4. The fish thinks the meaning of life is food. Fork it and swap the personality for your own character.
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
5
Conversational AI 2.0 From ElevenLabs▲652
Luke from ElevenLabs here. We just released Scribe Realtime v2, our new real-time Speech to Text model. We rebuilt it from the ground up around a new architecture that uses predictive transcription – it anticipates the next likely word before it’s spoken. That makes it both fast (around 150 ms latency) and highly accurate. Scribe v2 Realtime outperforms every low latency transcription model across 30 commonly used EU and Asian languages – 93.5% accuracy, compared to Gemini 2.5 Flash (91.4%), GPT-4o MiniTranscribe (90.7%), and Deepgram Nova 3 (85%). It supports 90+ languages including…
2025 · elevenlabs.io · its alternatives →
6
Word2vec Algorithm in ~100sloc with NumPy▲72
Here's a small demonstration of the fundamental aspects of the word-to-vec algorithm. It's implemented in a single python script and depends only on a single text file for training. It's not meant to be blazingly fast or anything, just a toy example to aid my understanding of how word vectors might be learnt from a corpus.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
7
Speeding up LLM inference 2x times (possibly)▲419
Here's a project I've been working on for the last few months. It's a new (I think) algorithm, that allows to adjust smoothly - and in real time - how many calculations you'd like to do during inference of an LLM model. It seems that it's possible to do just 20-25% of weight multiplications instead of all of them, and still get good inference results. I implemented it to run on M1/M2/M3 GPU. The mmul approximation itself can be pushed to run 2x fast before the quality of output collapses. The inference speed is just a bit faster than Llama.cpp's, because the rest of implementation…
2024 · asciinema.org · its alternatives →
8
Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB▲514
How small can a language model be while still doing something useful? I wanted to find out, and had some spare time over the holidays. Z80-μLM is a character-level language model with 2-bit quantized weights ({-2,-1,0,+1}) that runs on a Z80 with 64KB RAM. The entire thing: inference, weights, chat UI, it all fits in a 40KB .COM file that you can run in a CP/M emulator and hopefully even real hardware! It won't write your emails, but it can be trained to play a stripped down version of 20 Questions, and is sometimes able to maintain the illusion of having simple but terse conversations…
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
9
Google EmbeddingGemma 2free▲318
An open, lightweight multimodal embedding model
17d ago · blog.google · its alternatives →
10
Wordllama – Things you can do with the token embeddings of an LLM▲370
After working with LLMs for long enough, I found myself wanting a lightweight utility for doing various small tasks to prepare inputs, locate information and create evaluators. This library is two things: a very simple model and utilities that inference it (eg. fuzzy deduplication). The target platform is CPU, and it’s intended to be light, fast and pip installable — a library that lowers the barrier to working with strings semantically. You don’t need to install pytorch to use it, or any deep learning runtimes. How can this be accomplished? The model is simply token embeddings that are…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
11CP
Curated, Pre-trained ML Models for Transfer Learning▲324
2018 · modeldepot.io · its alternatives →
12
Explore large language models with 512MB of RAM▲138
Explore large language models in 512MB of RAM. Contribute to jncraton/languagemodels development by creating an account on GitHub.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
13SM
Sense2vec model trained on all 2015 Reddit comments▲225
2016 · sense2vec.spacy.io · its alternatives →
14
Tiny Diffusion – A character-level text diffusion model from scratch▲172
I previously posted this a month and a half ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45876742 I have rewritten it to be much more simple, from 951 lines of code to just 364, with no loss in core functionality or generation quality. I also added a tiny GPT implementation as a comparison (inspired by Andrej Karpathy's code). The two model implementations are ~80% identical, with the core differences being the generate and get_batch functions. The model architecture, training loop, etc, differ in only 19 lines of code. Trained weights are included, so you can just clone and run…
Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
15
I ran a language model on a PS2▲46
The Emotion Engine has 32 MB of RAM total, so the trick is streaming weights from CD-ROM one matrix at a time during the forward pass — only activations, KV cache and embeddings live in RAM. This means models bigger than the RAM can still run, they just read more from disc. Had to build a custom quantized format (PSNT), hack endianness, write a tokenizer pipeline, and most of the PS2 SDK from scratch (releasing that separately). The model itself is also custom — a 10M param Llama-style architecture I trained specifically for this. And it works. On real hardware.
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
16
Chonky – a neural approach for text semantic chunking▲169
TLDR: I’ve made a transformer model and a wrapper library that segments text into meaningful semantic chunks. The current text splitting approaches rely on heuristics (although one can use neural embedder to group semantically related sentences). I propose a fully neural approach to semantic chunking. I took the base distilbert model and trained it on a bookcorpus to split concatenated text paragraphs into original paragraphs. Basically it’s a token classification task. Model fine-tuning took day and a half on a 2x1080ti. The library could be used as a text splitter module in a RAG system or…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
17WA
Wikipedia2Vec – A tool for learning embeddings of words and entities▲105
2018 · wikipedia2vec.github.io · its alternatives →
18
Fine-grained stylistic control of LLMs using model arithmetic▲85
We developed a new framework that enables flexible control of generated text in language models. By combining several models and/or system prompts in one mathematical formula, it lets you tweak your style and combine model outputs with ease. A handy tool for those working with LLMs, looking for more fine-grained control of stylistic output. More details in our paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.14479. Feedback and potential applications are welcome.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
19
We fingerprinted 178 AI models' writing styles and similarity clusters▲78
We have a dataset of 3,095 standardized AI responses across 43 prompts. From each response, we extract a 32-dimension stylometric fingerprint (lexical richness, sentence structure, punctuation habits, formatting patterns, discourse markers). Some findings: - 9 clone clusters (>90% cosine similarity on z-normalized feature vectors) - Mistral Large 2 and Large 3 2512 score 84.8% on a composite metric combining 5 independent signals - Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite writes 78% like Claude 3 Opus. Costs 185x less - Meta has the strongest provider "house style" (37.5x distinctiveness ratio) - "Satirical…
Apr 2026 · rival.tips · its alternatives →
20
Plexe – ML Models from a Prompt▲130
Hey HN! We’re Vaibhav and Marcello. We’re building Plexe (https://github.com/plexe-ai/plexe), an open-source agent that turns natural language task descriptions into trained ML models. Here’s a video walkthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUwCSglhcXY. There are all kinds of uses for ML models that never get realized because the process of making them is messy and convoluted. You can spend months trying to find the data, clean it, experiment with models and deploy to production, only to find out that your project has been binned for taking so long.…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
21
Chonky – a neural text semantic chunking goes multilingual▲43
TLDR: I’m expanding the family of text-splitting Chonky models with new multilingual model. You can learn more about this neural approach in a previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43652968 Since the release of the first distilbert-based model I’ve released two more models based on a ModernBERT. All these models were pre-trained and fine-tuned primary on English texts. But recently mmBERT(https://huggingface.co/blog/mmbert) has been released. This model pre-trained on massive dataset that contains 1833 languages. So I had an idea of…
Oct 2025 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
22
UForm v2 – tiny CLIP-like embeddings in 21 languages and Graphcore API▲16
I want to share the most recent model release we have prepared. It's a Vision-Language understanding Transformer. It has 40% fewer parameters than vanilla CLIP while performing much better on text-to-image retrieval, where it's also beneficial that our output embeddings have 2x fewer dimensions (256 vs. 512). Moreover, it supports 21 languages, including popular English, Hindi, Chinese, Arabic, and lower-resource languages like Ukrainian, Hebrew, and Armenian. We have packed the library into ONNX and CoreML, providing PyTorch inference code for CPUs and GPUs and PopTorch code for Graphcore…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
23LR
Linear RNN/Reservoir hybrid generative model, one C file (no deps.)▲7
I just noticed it takes literally ~5 minutes to train millions parameters on slow CPU...but before you call Yudkowsky that "it's over", an important note: the main bottleneck is the corpus size, params are just 'cleverness' but given limited info it's powerless. Anyway, here is the project: https://github.com/bggb7781-collab/lrnnsmdds/tree/main couple of notes: 1. single C file, no dependencies. Below are literally all the "dependencies", not even custom header (copy paste from the top of the single c file): #define _POSIX_C_SOURCE 200809L #include #include…
Apr 2026 · raw.githubusercontent.com · its alternatives →
24
Ideogram 4.0 – open-weight 9.3B text-to-image model▲46
It's our new text-to-image model: a 9.3B single-stream diffusion transformer trained entirely from scratch. We focused heavily on controllability through structured JSON prompts, with strong text rendering, spatial awareness through bounding box guidance, and color palette control. It has the best text rendering of any open-weight model we've tested so far, and the NF4 quantized checkpoint runs on a single 24GB GPU. For more technical details and examples see our blog post: https://ideogram.ai/blog/ideogram-4.0/ We will be happy to answer any questions :)
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

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