Granite Embedding Multilingual R2: Open Apache 2.0 Multilingual Embeddings with 32K Context — Best Sub-100M Retrieval Quality

IBM released Granite Embedding Multilingual R2 under Apache 2.0, a sub-100M parameter model with 32K context window claiming top retrieval quality in its class across multiple languages. Critical for teams needing commercially permissive, efficient multilingual RAG pipelines without large model overhead.