SmolVLA is a compact (450M) open-source Vision-Language-Action model for robotics. Trained on community data, it runs on consumer hardware & outperforms larger models. Released with code & recipes.
Hi everyone!
I think there are a few really important ingredients for bringing AI agents into the physical world. First, they need to be able to interact with real environments. Second, due to the limits of on-robot hardware, the models need to be lightweight and efficient. And third, for the good of the community and wider adoption, these foundational models should ideally be open-source.
SmolVLA is an exciting new release because it squarely addresses these points. It's a compact (450M) Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that runs on consumer-grade hardware, is fully open-source, and was trained entirely on open, community-contributed robotics datasets from the LeRobot project.
Despite its small size, SmolVLA outperforms much larger VLAs on both simulation and real-world tasks. The team has also implemented things like asynchronous inference to make it even more responsive. This is a fantastic contribution for making capable, real-world robotics research more accessible to everyone.
Hugging Face is doing incredible work! Their open-source model hub—packed with thousands of pre-trained models—makes it a breeze to dive into NLP, vision, and generative AI. I love how the community and APIs make complex AI feel so accessible and fun. Huge kudos to the team for building such a welcoming ecosystem!
SmolVLA is a great example of efficient design meeting real-world usability — compact, open-source, and high-performing. Love that it’s accessible to the broader robotics community right out of the box.
Replies
Hugging Face is doing incredible work! Their open-source model hub—packed with thousands of pre-trained models—makes it a breeze to dive into NLP, vision, and generative AI. I love how the community and APIs make complex AI feel so accessible and fun. Huge kudos to the team for building such a welcoming ecosystem!
This is incredibly cool.
SmolVLA is a great example of efficient design meeting real-world usability — compact, open-source, and high-performing. Love that it’s accessible to the broader robotics community right out of the box.
Great to see this. Right application of AI. Way to go!
Interesting mission! How does open science translate into practical tools for users? 🤔
Love the mission of making AI more accessible! How are you planning to balance open-source values with sustainability? 🚀