text-embedding-ada-002

text-embedding-ada-002, released December 15, 2022, was OpenAI's major consolidation of its embedding lineup. It replaced five first-generation endpoints (spanning Ada, Babbage, Curie, and Davinci sizes across similarity, search, and classification tasks) with a single model producing 1536-dimensional vectors usable across search, clustering, classification, and recommendations.

At launch it beat the previous best Davinci embeddings on most benchmarks while being cheaper and more compact, and it became the default embedding model for the majority of OpenAI API consumers. It has since been superseded by the text-embedding-3 family (January 2024), but remains available for existing deployments. API-only; no weights are distributed.