Apologies, I appreciate the correction and indeed I was mistaken. There is mention of retrieval in the end of the paper, but indeed the focus is on classification tasks. Here’s the relevant portion in any case.

> Our studies of CLIP in a zero-shot setting show that the model displays significant promise for widely-applicable tasks like image retrieval or search. For example, it can find relevant images in a database given text, or relevant text given an image. Further, the relative ease of steering CLIP toward bespoke applications with little or no additional data or training could unlock a variety of novel applications that are hard for us to envision today, as has occurred with large language models over the past few years.