Recently, a startup in Seattle named Moondream launched a compact visual language model called moondream2. Despite its small size, the model has shown outstanding performance in various benchmark tests and has garnered significant attention. As an open-source model, moondream2 is expected to enable local image recognition capabilities on smartphones. Moondream2 was officially released in March and can process both text and image inputs, possessing functions such as answering questions, text extraction (OCR), object counting, and item classification.

AI startup Moondream has officially announced the completion of $4.5 million in seed funding and presents a disruptive viewpoint: in the world of AI models, smaller models may hold advantages. The company is backed by Felicis Ventures, Microsoft's M12 GitHub Fund, and Ascend, launching a visual language model with only 1.6 billion parameters that can compete with models four times its size in terms of performance.