MxBai Mixedbread AI Released 2024-04 embeddingretrievalRAG

MxBai Embed Large

Mixedbread's open-weights embedding model. State-of-the-art quality at 335M parameters.

Best for high-quality English embeddings
Sizes 335M
Context 512
License Apache 2.0
Min VRAM (default size, Q4) CPU
Rec VRAM 1 GB

What is MxBai Embed Large?

MxBai Embed Large is Mixedbread AI's open-weights language model. Released in 2024-04, it ships in 1 size (335M) and is licensed Apache 2.0. The most popular use case is high-quality English embeddings.

VRAM and hardware

The 335M size fits in CPU of VRAM.

Size Min VRAM (Q4_K_M) Recommended VRAM Tokens/sec on 3090
335M CPU CPU ~40 tok/s

How to run MxBai Embed Large locally

Option 1: Ollama (simplest)

ollama pull mxbai-embed-large
ollama run mxbai-embed-large

Option 2: Mullama (production)

mullama pull mxbai-embed-large
mullama run mxbai-embed-large

Option 3: llama.cpp (CLI)

# Download a GGUF from Hugging Face (search "mxbai-embed-large gguf")
./llama-cli -m mxbai-embed-large.Q4_K_M.gguf -p "Hello, AI!"

Option 4: Python with Mullama or llama-cpp-python

from mullama import Model, Context
model = Model.load("mxbai-embed-large.Q4_K_M.gguf", n_gpu_layers=99)
ctx = Context(model, n_ctx=4096)
print(ctx.generate("Hello, AI!", 256))

What you can build with MxBai Embed Large

  • RAG
  • retrieval
  • semantic search

Hardware it fits on

  • Apple Silicon (8GB): 335M in MLX
  • Apple Silicon (16GB): 335M in MLX
  • Apple Silicon (32GB): 335M in MLX or GGUF
  • Apple Silicon (64GB+): 335M in MLX
  • RTX 3090 (24GB): 335M at Q4_K_M
  • RTX 4090 (24GB): same as 3090, ~30% faster
  • RTX 5090 (32GB): 335M at Q8_0
  • 2× RTX 6000 Ada (96GB total): 335M at Q4_K_M

Related models in the MxBai family

This is the only MxBai-family model in the catalog right now.

Other models you might consider

  • Llama 3.1 (Meta) — 8B, general-purpose chat, agentic workflows, code
  • Llama 3.2 (Meta) — 1B, low-end hardware, mobile, edge deployment
  • Llama 3.2 Vision (Meta) — 11B, vision + chat on desktop GPUs
  • Llama 3.3 (Meta) — 70B, best-in-class 70B for desktops
  • Llama 4 (Meta) — Scout 17B (109B MoE), vision + long context (10M tokens)
  • Qwen 2.5 (Alibaba) — 0.5B, strongest 7B-32B on consumer hardware