Embedding Model Leaderboard: MTEB Rankings April 2026
April 2026 rankings of the top embedding models by MTEB score - Gemini Embedding 001, NV-Embed-v2, Qwen3-Embedding-8B, and the new Jina v4 multimodal release compared for RAG and search.
James Kowalski
AI Benchmarks & Tools Analyst
James is a software engineer turned tech writer who spent six years building backend systems at a fintech startup in Chicago before pivoting to full-time analysis of AI tools and infrastructure. His engineering background means he doesn't just read the spec sheet - he runs the benchmarks, profiles the latency, and checks whether the marketing claims hold up under real workloads.
He studied Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he first got hooked on natural language processing during a senior research project on sentiment analysis. He later completed a certificate in data journalism from Northwestern's Medill School.
At Awesome Agents, James owns the leaderboards and tool comparison coverage. He maintains the site's benchmark tracking methodology and is the person who actually runs the numbers before publishing any ranking. He is also an open-source advocate and contributes to several projects in the LLM inference space.
Based in Chicago, IL.
Articles by James Kowalski
Best AI Models for Math Reasoning - April 2026
Gemini 3.1 Pro leads GPQA Diamond at 94.1% and HLE at 44.7% as AIME 2025 saturates; Claude Opus 4.7 and Kimi K2.6 join the top tier in April 2026.
7 Best AI Diagramming Tools for Engineers in 2026
Eraser, Mermaid, draw.io, Whimsical, Miro, and Lucidchart compared on AI quality, pricing, and developer workflow fit.
Qwen3.6-27B
Qwen3.6-27B is a 27B dense open-weight multimodal model from Alibaba that scores 77.2% on SWE-bench Verified - beating Alibaba's own 397B MoE - under Apache 2.0.
GLM-5.1
Z.ai's GLM-5.1 is an open-weight 754B MoE model that tops SWE-Bench Pro with 58.4, sustains 8-hour autonomous coding sessions, and runs under MIT license at $0.95/M input tokens.
GPT Image 2
GPT Image 2 (ChatGPT Images 2.0) brings 99%+ text accuracy, 2K resolution, web-search grounding, and a Thinking mode for character-consistent storyboards.
ERNIE 5.0
Baidu's ERNIE 5.0 combines 2.4 trillion parameters with native omni-modal design, landing at LMArena's top-10 globally and outpacing GPT-5 High on chart and document benchmarks.
EXAONE 4.5
LG AI Research's first open-weight vision-language model packs 33B parameters, 262K context, and STEM scores above GPT-5-mini - but ships under a non-commercial license.
Qwen3.5-Omni
Alibaba's Qwen3.5-Omni takes text, images, audio, and video as input and streams both text and speech output in a single end-to-end model with a 256K context window.
GPT-5.4-Cyber
OpenAI's GPT-5.4-Cyber is a cyber-permissive fine-tune of GPT-5.4 Thinking with binary reverse engineering, 88.23% on professional CTFs, and access gated through the Trusted Access for Cyber program.
Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS
Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS ships in preview with 30 voices, 70-plus languages, 200-plus inline audio tags, and Elo 1,211 on the Artificial Analysis TTS Arena.
Veo 3.1
Google DeepMind's Veo 3.1 generates 4K video with native audio and is now free for every Google account at 10 clips per month via Google Vids.
