  In this work, we present a comprehensive exploration of finetuning Malaysian
language models, specifically Llama2 and Mistral, on embedding tasks involving
negative and positive pairs. We release two distinct models tailored for
Semantic Similarity and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
  For Semantic Similarity, our 600 million parameter Llama2 model outperforms
OpenAI text-embedding-ada-002 across all recall@k metrics for b.cari.com.my,
c.cari.com.my, Malay news, and Malaysian Twitter test sets.
  In the realm of RAG models, our approach proves competitive with OpenAI
text-embedding-ada-002 in the Malaysian context. Notably, our 2 billion
parameter Llama2 model achieves superior Recall@5, Recall@10 for the "Melayu"
keyword research papers dataset and excels in Recall@3, Recall@5, and Recall@10
for the lom.agc.gov.my dataset.
  These findings underscore the effectiveness of our finetuning strategy and
highlight the performance gains in both Semantic Similarity and RAG tasks.
  All models released at
https://huggingface.co/collections/mesolitica/malaysian-embedding-6523612bfe5881ad35f81b99
