You're thinking of the old "ada" GPT-3 model - the one that was a companion to "davinci" and "babbage".
I believe "text-embedding-ada-002" is entirely unrelated to those old GPT-3 models. It's a recent embedding model (released in December 2022 - https://openai.com/blog/new-and-improved-embedding-model ) which OpenAI claim is their best current best available embedding model.
I understand your confusion: OpenAI are notoriously bad at naming things!
Edit: looking at the press release, the improvement over old Ada is ... marginal? And Ada-01 is/was a poor performing model, tbh. I guess I'll have to run some tests, but at first sight it doesn't seem that wow-ey.
So just to be super clear, this is an embedding model. It generates no text. It’s not outputting words.
Maybe I am assuming incorrectly, but I think the poor performance you are referring to is the old Ada completion model, where the output is text. That was poor indeed.
