Embedding English Wikipedia in under 15 minutes with Modal and Hugging Face TEI

Modal and Hugging Face's Text Embedding Inference server can embed the entire English Wikipedia in about 15 minutes for just over $15, using Modal's serverless GPU scaling. The post argues open-source embedding models beat API-based ones like OpenAI's text-embedding-ada-002 for production RAG, since they can be fine-tuned on user data and avoid rate limits and per-token costs.