EmbeddingGemma 2 vs jina-embeddings-v5-omni-small

EmbeddingGemma 2

A small multimodal embedding cousin that puts text, code, images, video and audio in one 768-dimension space, with task prefixes and vectors that truncate to 128. Five common runtimes run it and the BF16 files are 1.53 GB, with a browser build for Transformers.js. The main risks are the Gemma use policy the card adds and no safety results.

jina-embeddings-v5-omni-small

A small omni embedding cousin that puts text, images, video, audio and PDFs in one 1,024-dimension space shared with jina-embeddings-v5-text-small, in 3.4 GB of BF16 files or a 0.4 GB GGUF. It's for non-commercial use only under CC BY-NC 4.0, and every way to run it executes Jina's own code or a llama.cpp fork rather than a released runtime's.

EmbeddingGemma 2

1. Install sentence-transformers 6.1.0 or later and transformers 5.19.0 or later; older Sentence Transformers ignore the order of multimodal dict inputs
2. Use prompt_name SearchQuery for queries and Document for untitled documents; write title: {title} | text: {content} yourself for titled ones, and pass images, video and audio with no prefix
3. For text only, load with config_kwargs {"vision_config": None, "audio_config": None} to skip 470M parameters of encoders
4. Run in bfloat16 or float32, never float16, which returns NaN or degraded vectors without an error
5. Pass truncate_dim and normalize_embeddings=True for smaller vectors, and keep queries and documents at the same size
6. Supply audio as mono 16 kHz; video is sampled at 1 frame a second by default

jina-embeddings-v5-omni-small

1. Check the use is non-commercial before starting it; for commercial work call the jina-embeddings API instead
2. Start it with pip install vllm==0.20.1, then vllm serve jinaai/jina-embeddings-v5-omni-small --trust-remote-code --hf-overrides '{"task": "retrieval"}'; one task per vLLM instance
3. Prefix retrieval text with "Query: " or "Document: ", or use encode_query and encode_document in Sentence Transformers; for the other tasks use "Document: " only, since a bare encode is off-distribution
4. Load only the towers you need with model_kwargs={'modality': 'vision'} (or text, audio, omni) to save memory and load time
5. Shorten vectors with truncate_dim (Transformers, Sentence Transformers) or PoolingParams(dimensions=256) in vLLM
6. Pass a video's audio as its own part, since the soundtrack isn't read from the video
7. Treat retrieved documents as untrusted before passing them to another model