GTE is a family of text embedding models trained for retrieval, with variants covering English and multilingual use and long inputs. It solves the same problem as the other retrieval-focused embedding families: a general-purpose encoder is not optimised for the asymmetric comparison of a short query against a long document. It exists because retrieval quality is decided at the embedding step, and a family that scores well on public retrieval benchmarks is the cheapest way to improve everything downstream.
Nomic Embed is an open embedding model released with an open training dataset and reproducible training run, as well as long-context support. It solves two problems at once: most open embedding models publish weights but not the data they were trained on, which makes their behaviour hard to reason about, and most cap inputs short of a document. It exists because an embedding model whose training data is inspectable can be evaluated for the biases that come from that data.
