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Moondream: Moondream 2

Moondream 2 Overview

Moondream 2 is a small open-source vision-language model from Moondream, the company founded by Vikhyat Korrapati. It was first released in early 2024 and updated through mid-2025. At approximately 1.9 billion parameters, it is designed to run efficiently on consumer hardware such as laptops and edge devices while supporting a practical range of multimodal tasks. Moondream 2 combines a vision encoder based on SigLIP with a compact language backbone, trained for image understanding tasks rather than as a general chat model.

The model accepts an image paired with a natural language prompt and produces text responses, supporting visual question answering, image captioning, and image-conditioned dialogue. Later Moondream 2 releases added object localization through a point API that returns coordinates for queried objects, along with improvements to OCR, counting, and document understanding. Moondream 2 is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license and is available through Hugging Face and the maintainer's distribution. Because the model is updated frequently, production deployments should pin to a specific revision rather than tracking the latest release. A successor model, Moondream 3 (Preview), was released in September 2025 with a 9B mixture-of-experts architecture and 2B active parameters, offering substantially stronger visual reasoning than Moondream 2 while retaining the efficiency-focused design. A referring expression segmentation extension to Moondream 3 was released in March 2026.

Moondream 2 Details & Performance

Details

Resources

GitHub

Vision Tasks

Vision LanguageObject DetectionCaptioningVisual Question Answering

Features

Multimodal Vision

Usage

Past 30 Days

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Performance

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Moondream 2 License

Apache 2.0

License terms and commercial-use guidance for Moondream 2.

This model is released under the Apache License 2.0, a permissive open-source license that allows commercial use, modification, distribution, and patent use.

Read the full Apache 2.0 license ↗

Yes. Under the terms of the Apache 2.0 license, you can freely use this model for commercial purposes, including in proprietary products. You must retain the copyright notice and disclaimers when redistributing.

License information is provided as a guide and is not legal advice.