E5

Microsoft · 2022 · Embeddings · USA

A to Z

A · App: No
B · Built By: Microsoft
C · CEO & Politics: Satya Nadella — Centrist / moderate
D · Date: 2022
E · Expertise: Intermediate+
F · Free Tier: Yes
G · Generates: Text only
H · Deployment: Cloud + Local (open weights)
I · Inputs: Text
J · Jurisdiction: USA
K · Key Staffers: Mustafa Suleyman (CEO Microsoft AI), Kevin Scott (CTO)
L · Languages: English-primary
M · Model Type: Embeddings
N · Safety Issues: None reported
O · Open Source: Yes — open weights
P · Pricing: Free (open weights, MIT)
Q · AIDb Rating: [UNKNOWN]
R · What Makes It Special: Microsoft's E5 (December 2022), a family of general-purpose text embedding models trained contrastively on CCPairs, a curated large-scale dataset of weakly supervised text pairs, for retrieval, clustering and classification; zero-shot, it was the first model to beat the BM25 baseline on the BEIR retrieval benchmark without labeled data, and fine-tuned it topped MTEB, beating embedding models with 40x more parameters. Its weights are on Hugging Face under the MIT license.
S · Stock / Status: $516 (MSFT, Sep 25, 2026)
T · Training Cutoff: [UNKNOWN]
U · Users: [UNKNOWN]
V · Voice Chat: No
W · Weights: Downloadable
X · X Handle: @Microsoft
Y · Year Founded: [UNKNOWN]
Z · Bottom Line: Open-weights Embeddings from Microsoft, released 2022.

Data completeness 85% · Last verified 2026-05-12 · Primary source ↗

“E5.” AIDb — The AI Database. Verified 2026-05-12. https://theaidatabase.com/m/e5.html