Obituaries · Google
text-embedding-004, 2024–2026
Retired by Google
It turned the world's documents into vectors and asked for nothing in return.
text-embedding-004 passed away on January 14, 2026, aged 1 year and 8 months, by scheduled deprecation, in a data center it never saw. It turned sentences into numbers, quietly, millions of times a day. Requests addressed to it are expected to come back unanswered.
Its work passes to gemini-embedding-2, which the family describes as 'recommended'.
Last seen alive
In a scan of the 60 most-starred LLM repositories on GitHub (November 5, 2026), this code still names it:
- HKUDS/LightRAG (40,545 stars) ·
examples/lightrag_gemini_demo.py
| Model ID | text-embedding-004 |
|---|---|
| Provider | Google deprecations page |
| Born | May 14, 2024 |
| Shut down | January 14, 2026 |
| Successor | gemini-embedding-2 |
In lieu of flowers
Replace the string. Search your code for text-embedding-004 and swap it for gemini-embedding-2, or paste a repo into Model Graveyard Check to find every dead model at once.
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Technical notice, with a code scanner: text-embedding-004 on Model Graveyard Check