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Hugging Face says its new robotics model is so efficient it can run on a MacBook


Hugging Face released an open AI model for robotics called SmolVLA that can run on low-cost hardware thanks to its small size, the company says.

Trained on “compatibly licensed,” community-shared datasets, SmolVLA outperforms much larger models for robotics in both virtual and real-world environments, Hugging Face claims. “SmolVLA aims to democratize access to vision-language-action [VLA] models and accelerate research toward generalist robotic agents,” writes Hugging Face in a blog post. Hugging Face claims that SmolVLA is small enough to run on a single consumer GPU — or even a MacBook — and can be tested and deployed on “affordable” hardware, including the company’s own robotics systems.

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