{
  "id": 925892,
  "title": "Toast 1: A New Embedding Model That Rivals OpenAI at a Fraction of the Cost",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/15/toast-1-a-new-embedding-model-that-rivals-openai-at-a-fraction-of-the",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-08-15T01:13:27.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/trismegistus/toast-1-a-new-embedding-model-that-rivals-openai-at-a-fraction-of-the-cost-3k79"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Mixedbread AI has unveiled Toast 1, a new embedding model that challenges OpenAI's text-embedding-3-large while being more cost-effective. Embedding models translate text into numerical vectors that capture semantic meaning. They are crucial for applications like semantic search, RAG, clustering, classification, and recommendation systems. Toast 1 boasts quality and cost advantages over OpenAI's model. Benchmark results show Toast 1 scoring slightly higher on MTEB tasks such as retrieval, STS, classification, and reranking. Its multilingual support covers over 50 languages, and it offers variable dimensionality for cost optimization. Toast 1's single-model approach with Matryoshka embeddings allows flexible use of different dimensionalities. As embedding models become integral to AI applications, Toast 1 offers a compelling open-weight alternative to OpenAI's costly offering.",
  "summary": "Toast 1: A New Embedding Model That Rivals OpenAI at a Fraction of the Cost Mixedbread AI announced Toast 1, a new embedding model that claims to match or exceed OpenAI's text-embedding-3-large on standard benchmarks while being significantly cheaper to run. The announcement reached 173 points on Hacker News with 58 comments. What Are Embedding Models? Embedding models convert text into dense…",
  "key_points": [
    "Toast 1 is a new embedding model from Mixedbread AI",
    "It rivals OpenAI's text-embedding-3-large at lower cost",
    "Toast 1 supports 50+ languages with variable dimensionality"
  ],
  "editors_take": "The emergence of Toast 1 as a cost-effective alternative to OpenAI's text-embedding-3-large model shifts the landscape of AI applications by offering comparable quality at a lower cost.",
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}