SmolVLM

Hugging Face · 2024 · Multimodal LLM · France

A to Z

A · App: No
B · Built By: Hugging Face
C · CEO & Politics: Clément Delangue — European progressive / open-source advocate
D · Date: 2024
E · Expertise: Intermediate+
F · Free Tier: Yes
G · Generates: Text only
H · Deployment: Cloud + Local (open weights)
I · Inputs: Text+Image+Audio
J · Jurisdiction: France
K · Key Staffers: Thomas Wolf (CSO & Co-Founder), Julien Chaumond (CTO & Co-Founder)
L · Languages: English-primary
M · Model Type: Multimodal LLM
N · Safety Issues: None reported
O · Open Source: Yes — open weights
P · Pricing: Free (open weights, Apache 2.0)
Q · AIDb Rating: [UNKNOWN]
R · What Makes It Special: Hugging Face's SmolVLM, a compact open multimodal model built on SmolLM2 and the Idefics3 architecture that takes interleaved images and text and returns text; it encodes each 384x384 image patch as 81 visual tokens for faster, lower-memory on-device use.
S · Stock / Status: Private ($4.5B valuation, Aug 2023; exploring a sale at $13B+ as of Aug 2026)
T · Training Cutoff: [UNKNOWN]
U · Users: [UNKNOWN]
V · Voice Chat: No
W · Weights: Downloadable
X · X Handle: @huggingface
Y · Year Founded: [UNKNOWN]
Z · Bottom Line: Open-weights Multimodal LLM from Hugging Face, released 2024.

Data completeness 85% · Last verified 2026-05-12 · Primary source ↗

“SmolVLM.” AIDb — The AI Database. Verified 2026-05-12. https://theaidatabase.com/m/smolvlm.html