As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/m/text-embedding-3-small/

# text-embedding-3-small

OpenAI, text-embedding-3 family. Status: current. Type: embedding model. Released: 2024-01-25.

## How to call it

| Provider | Model id | Endpoint | Docs |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI API | `text-embedding-3-small` | https://api.openai.com/v1/embeddings | https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/text-embedding-3-small |
| Azure OpenAI (Microsoft Foundry) | `text-embedding-3-small` |  | https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/foundry/foundry-models/concepts/models-sold-directly-by-azure |

## Pricing

- Input: $0.02 per 1M tokens
- Unit as published: per 1M tokens (USD)
- Source: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
- Last checked: 2026-09-29

## Specs

- Input: text
- Output: text
- Context window: not published
- Max output: not published
- Open weights: no
- Licence: proprietary

## Where it stands

- Newer embedding models in the registry since its release: 6. The 5 newest:
  - EmbeddingGemma 2 (2026-10-06) https://postcutoff.com/m/embeddinggemma-2/
  - Cohere Embed 5 Fast (2026-09-30) https://postcutoff.com/m/cohere-embed-v5-fast/
  - Cohere Embed 5 Pro (2026-09-30) https://postcutoff.com/m/cohere-embed-v5-pro/
  - Gemini Embedding 2 (2026-04-22) https://postcutoff.com/m/gemini-embedding-2/
  - Cohere Rerank 4 (Pro / Fast) (2025-12-11) https://postcutoff.com/m/cohere-rerank-4/
- Closed weights; access is hosted only.

## What stands out

- Cheap embeddings: Improved successor to ada-002 at $0.02 per 1M tokens. Source: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/text-embedding-3-small
- Shortenable vectors: Default 1536 dimensions; can be shortened with the `dimensions` parameter. Max input 8192 tokens. Source: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/embeddings

## Notes

Output is an embedding vector.

```bash
curl https://api.openai.com/v1/embeddings \
 -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
 -d '{"model":"text-embedding-3-small","input":"hello"}'
```

Sources:
- https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/text-embedding-3-small
- https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
- Models overview: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models

Model page: https://postcutoff.com/m/text-embedding-3-small/