# CLIP by OpenAI

10 Hacker News commenters recommended CLIP by OpenAI and 5 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Recommended for image embeddings and similarity search; it is open source and good at object recognition. Critics say it struggles beyond objects and lacks temporal understanding.

## Why people recommend it

- Image similarity search results (2 comments): "Using a CLIP or Dino v2 model to produce image embeddings would probably improve the similarity search a lot" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46520824)) "CLIP should give the images that actually look similar." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46523641))
- Open source image encoding (2 comments): "CLIP is an open source model used for image encoding" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49487356)) "CLIP was one of first of Image-text type models" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46089447))
- Small specialised model worth using (2 comments): "What I'm actually excited about in AI are smaller specialised things like whisper, CLIP, SAM, etc." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48343751)) "CLIP[1] for actions! Very cool." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49828036))

## What people warn about

- Weak beyond object recognition (2 comments): "CLIP is really good at object definitions, but struggles at pretty much everything else" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49459191)) "CLIP here was essentially useless" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46048230))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [EmbeddingGemma](https://hackerapproved.com/p/embeddinggemma-2.md): 27 recommend
- [Ternlight](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ternlight.md): 17 recommend
- [Gemini Embedding 2](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gemini-embedding-2.md): 9 recommend
- [Qwen3-Embedding](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qwen3-embedding-0-6b.md): 8 recommend
- [ModernBERT](https://hackerapproved.com/p/modernbert.md): 7 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "CLIP by OpenAI", https://hackerapproved.com/p/clip/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).