What it is
multilingual-e5-base is an embedding model that turns text into vectors for document search, published by Microsoft researchers (intfloat) on Hugging Face on 19 May 2023. It has about 278 million parameters and a configured context window of 514 tokens.
Its card lists the licence as MIT. In short, the licence allows commercial use, modification and redistribution as long as the copyright notice is kept.
Hugging Face counted about 7,254,952 downloads of it in the 30 days before we checked (7 Oct 2026), and 392 people have liked it there.
The card lists 94 languages: multilingual, af, am, ar, as, az, be, bg, bn, br, bs, ca and 82 more (ISO codes as given on the card).