embeddings come in handy to augment LLMs [0], but as you suspect, some try LLMs themselves as an outright embedding model with varying degrees of success: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/12y3stx/embeddi... / https://huggingface.co/spaces/mteb/leaderboard

[0] https://simonwillison.net/2023/Oct/23/embeddings/