Perplexity releases pplx-embed-v2-late multimodal late-interaction embedding models under MIT

Perplexity has published pplx-embed-v2-late, a family of multimodal late-interaction (ColBERT) retrievers for text, images, and visual documents built on Qwen3.5 with bidirectional attention, in 0.6B and 9B sizes on Hugging Face under the MIT license. The model card says both models produce one 128-dimensional vector per token, share an embedding space so the 0.6B model can query an index built with the 9B model, and were distilled from an internal 18B ColBERT teacher. The card's citation dates the accompanying Perplexity blog post October 7, 2026. Perplexity also published pplx-embed-v2-context-9b-preview, a contextual embedding model for document chunks that its card labels a preview whose weights and interface may change. USASI has not tested these models.12

USASI. (2026, October 13). Perplexity releases pplx-embed-v2-late multimodal late-interaction embedding models under MIT. United States of America Superintelligence. https://unitedstatesofamericasuperintelligence.com/news/perplexity-releases-pplx-embed-v2-late/

@misc{usasi_news_perplexity_releases_pplx_embed_v2_late,
  author = {{USASI}},
  title = {Perplexity releases pplx-embed-v2-late multimodal late-interaction embedding models under MIT},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  howpublished = {\url{https://unitedstatesofamericasuperintelligence.com/news/perplexity-releases-pplx-embed-v2-late/}},
  note = {United States of America Superintelligence. Last updated 2026-10-13}
}