Hugging Face has achieved a remarkable breakthrough in AI, introducing vision-language models that run on devices as small as smartphones while outperforming their predecessors that require massive data centers. The company’s new SmolVLM-256M model, requiring less than one gigabyte of GPU memory, surpasses the performance of their Idefics 80B model from just 17 months ago — a system 300 times larger. This dramatic reduction in size and improvement in capability marks a watershed moment for practical AI deployment. “When we released Idefics 80B in August 2023, we were the first company to open-source a video language model,” Andrés Marafioti, machine learning research engineer at Hugging Face, said in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “By achieving a 300X size reduction while improving performance, SmolVLM marks a breakthrough in vision-language models.”

Full report : Hugging Face shrinks AI vision models to phone-friendly size, slashing computing costs.