BGE-M3
Hugging Face (BAAI) Open weights
The catch: Released January 2024 with no newer M3 version on BAAI's Hugging Face page; the card's sparse and multi-vector examples use BAAI's FlagEmbedding library.
| Access | Open weights |
|---|---|
| Free limits | Free to download and self-host; you pay only for your own compute. 1024-dim dense embeddings plus sparse and multi-vector (ColBERT) outputs from one model; inputs up to 8192 tokens; 100+ languages. The BAAI card states no parameter count (Ollama lists it as bge-m3:567m). |
| Modality | embeddings |
| Credit card | Not required |
| Commercial use | Allowed |
| Trains on your data | – |
| Licence or terms | MIT |
| Context window | 8,192 tokens |
| Model id | BAAI/bge-m3 |
| Base URL | – |
| Last checked | 2 Oct 2026 |
How to use BGE-M3
Download the weights and serve them yourself; the quickstart below shows one way. Licence: MIT.
Quickstart
ollama pull bge-m3
Paste into Claude Code
I want to run the open-weight model "BGE-M3" (BAAI/bge-m3) for my project. Please: 1. Check the model card and tell me the hardware it needs and the simplest way to serve it (vLLM, SGLang, Ollama or a hosted endpoint). 2. Give me a minimal working setup and a test request. 3. Tell me the licence terms for commercial use. 4. If a cheaper or smaller variant would do the job, mention it.
Before you ship on it
- Released January 2024 with no newer M3 version on BAAI's Hugging Face page; the card's sparse and multi-vector examples use BAAI's FlagEmbedding library.
- MIT licence (licence tag on huggingface.co/BAAI/bge-m3); commercial use allowed.
- Free to run means you pay for the GPUs, the serving stack and the on-call.
Questions
Is BGE-M3 free?
Yes. Open weights offers it as open weights, with these limits: Self-host free · MIT. No credit card is needed.
Can I use BGE-M3 commercially?
Yes, under MIT. Check the current terms before you ship.
How do I start with BGE-M3?
Download the weights and serve them yourself; the quickstart below shows one way. Licence: MIT.
Source: huggingface.co/BAAI/bge-m3, checked 2 Oct 2026.