Model reference · open weights

small

Embeddings funnel-transformer Embeddings 1 build Open weights 93k dl/mo

small is an open-weight embedding model from funnel-transformer. small (BF16) weighs 524 MB; 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.

  • Funnel-Transformer/small is a feature-extraction model developed by funnel-transformer and published under the Apache-2.0 license.
  • It is an uncased English language model with a context length of 512 tokens, designed to extract vector representations for downstream tasks such as sequence classification.
  • The model was pretrained on a large corpus of English data using a self-supervised objective similar to ELECTRA.

Summary of the funnel-transformer/small model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byfunnel-transformer
Released2022-03-02
VRAM524 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for small (BF16)

524 MBweights, 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 funnel-transformer says about small

Read the model card

Pretrained model on English language using a similar objective objective as ELECTRA. It was introduced in this paper and first released in this repository. This model is uncased: it does not make a difference between english and English.

Disclaimer: The team releasing Funnel Transformer did not write a model card for this model so this model card has been written by the Hugging Face team.

Model description

Funnel Transformer is a transformers model pretrained on a large corpus of English data in a self-supervised fashion. This means it was pretrained on the raw texts only, with no humans labelling them in any way (which is why it can use lots of publicly available data) with an automatic process to generate inputs and labels from those texts.

More precisely, a small language model corrupts the input texts and serves as a generator of inputs for this model, and the pretraining objective is to predict which token is an original and which one has been replaced, a bit like a GAN training.

This way, the model learns an inner representation of the English language that can then be used to extract features useful for downstream tasks: if you have a dataset of labeled sentences for instance, you can train a standard classifier using the features produced by the BERT model as inputs.

Intended uses & limitations

You can use the raw model to extract a vector representation of a given text, but it's mostly intended to be fine-tuned on a downstream task. See the model hub to look for fine-tuned versions on a task that interests you.

Note that this model is primarily aimed at being fine-tuned on tasks that use the whole sentence (potentially masked) to make decisions, such as sequence classification, token classification or question answering. For tasks such as text generation you should look at model like GPT2.

How to use

Here is how to use this model to get the features of a given text in PyTorch:

from transformers import FunnelTokenizer, FunnelModel
tokenizer = FunnelTokenizer.from_pretrained("funnel-transformer/small")
model = FunneModel.from_pretrained("funnel-transformer/small")
text = "Replace me by any text you'd like."
encoded_input = tokenizer(text, return_tensors='pt')
output = model(**encoded_input)

and in TensorFlow:

from transformers import FunnelTokenizer, TFFunnelModel
tokenizer = FunnelTokenizer.from_pretrained("funnel-transformer/small")
model = TFFunnelModel.from_pretrained("funnel-transformer/small")
text = "Replace me by any text you'd like."
encoded_input = tokenizer(text, return_tensors='tf')
output = model(encoded_input)

Training data

The BERT model was pretrained on:

BibTeX entry and citation info

@misc{dai2020funneltransformer,
    title={Funnel-Transformer: Filtering out Sequential Redundancy for Efficient Language Processing},
    author={Zihang Dai and Guokun Lai and Yiming Yang and Quoc V. Le},
    year={2020},
    eprint={2006.03236},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    primaryClass={cs.LG}
}

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

© 2026 AxForge · EU-hosted AI infrastructure Pricing Docs Trust Privacy Terms