Model reference · open weights

clip-ViT-L-14

Embeddings sentence-transformers Embeddings 1 build Licence not stated 0 dl/mo

clip-ViT-L-14 is an open-weight embedding model from sentence-transformers. clip-ViT-L-14 (BF16) weighs 1.7 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

For self-hosting, compare this build's requirements below with the GPU you plan to rent.

  • clip-ViT-L-14 is an image and text model developed by sentence-transformers that maps both modalities to a shared vector space.
  • It is designed for tasks such as image search, zero-shot image classification, image clustering, and image deduplication.
  • The model achieves a top-1 accuracy of 75.4 on the ImageNet validation set.

Summary of the sentence-transformers/clip-ViT-L-14 model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bysentence-transformers
Released2022-04-12
VRAM1.7 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for clip-ViT-L-14 (BF16)

1.7 GBweights, file size
1.1 GBruntime overhead
CardRunsMemory
RTX 3060 12 GBfits11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GBfits15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GBfits31.0 GB
L40S 48 GBfits44.0 GB
A100 80 GBfits78.2 GB
H100 80 GBfits78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GBfits93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unifiedfits107 GB
H200 141 GBfits138 GB
B200 180 GBfits176 GB

From the model card

What sentence-transformers says about clip-ViT-L-14

Read the model card

This is the Image & Text model CLIP, which maps text and images to a shared vector space. For applications of the models, have a look in our documentation SBERT.net - Image Search

Usage

After installing sentence-transformers (pip install sentence-transformers), the usage of this model is easy:

from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer, util
from PIL import Image

#Load CLIP model
model = SentenceTransformer('clip-ViT-L-14')

#Encode an image:
img_emb = model.encode(Image.open('two_dogs_in_snow.jpg'))

#Encode text descriptions
text_emb = model.encode(['Two dogs in the snow', 'A cat on a table', 'A picture of London at night'])

#Compute cosine similarities
cos_scores = util.cos_sim(img_emb, text_emb)
print(cos_scores)

See our SBERT.net - Image Search documentation for more examples how the model can be used for image search, zero-shot image classification, image clustering and image deduplication.

Performance

In the following table we find the zero-shot ImageNet validation set accuracy:

ModelTop 1 Performance
clip-ViT-B-3263.3
clip-ViT-B-1668.1
clip-ViT-L-1475.4

For a multilingual version of the CLIP model for 50+ languages have a look at: clip-ViT-B-32-multilingual-v1

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

How it works

How embedding models work

Your textsentence / documentEncodermaps meaningVectorlist of numbersAn embedding model turns text into a vector, so similar meanings sit close together, which is the basis of search and RAG.
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