Embedding Models Measure Meaning. Frontier LLMs Are Complicating It.
OpenAI's text-embedding-3-large moved MTEB from 61.0% to 64.6%. And the argument that number started is reshaping frontier LLM embedding models. Research on arXiv splits the field cleanly: LLMs used as embedders beat dedicated embedding models on reasoning-heavy retrieval, dedicated models win on classification. And the two
