January 23, 2025:
Hugging Face Unveils Tiny Yet Powerful AI Models - Hugging Face introduced SmolVLM-256M and SmolVLM-500M, the smallest AI models capable of analyzing images, videos, and text, designed for devices with limited resources. With 256 million and 500 million parameters, they outperform larger models like Idefics 80B on benchmarks despite being tailored for low-cost, large-scale data processing. Trained on The Cauldron and Docmatix datasets, these models are freely available under an Apache 2.0 license.
Concerns persist about smaller AI models struggling with complex reasoning due to their tendency to recognize only surface-level patterns.
