Moondream
M87 LabsMoondream is M87 Labs' small vision-language model line, built to run quickly on local hardware. Moondream 3.1, a 9B mixture-of-experts model with 2B active parameters, answers questions, writes captions, and returns points and bounding boxes as structured output, with an optional reasoning mode. The earlier Moondream 2 is a 2B model.
Scored on Moondream 3.1, whose custom license forbids reselling general-purpose hosted Moondream inference. Moondream 2 is still published under Apache 2.0.
Openness
3 high confidence- weights
- open(model.safetensors on the Hub, ungated)
- data
- described(the changelog names RL fine-tuning across 55 vision-language tasks
- code
- partial(inference code only
- license
- Moondream-Model-License-1.0(commercial use, modification and redistribution allowed
Moondream 3.1's weights may be used commercially, fine-tuned and redistributed, but its license forbids offering Moondream itself as a general-purpose hosted service. M87 Labs publishes neither the training data nor the training code. Moondream-Model-License-1.0 allows commercial use only within a bound, so the license tier is use_bounded.
- https://huggingface.co/api/models/moondream/moondream3.1-9B-A2B?expand[]=downloads&expand[]=cardData&expand[]=gated&expand[]=createdAt&expand[]=lastModified&expand[]=siblings recorded 2026-09-27
Hub metadata for moondream3.1-9B-A2B: gated false, model.safetensors, license other, license_name moondream-model-license-1.0
- https://huggingface.co/vikhyatk/moondream2/raw/main/README.md recorded 2026-09-27
Changelog: "RL fine-tuning applied across 55 vision-language tasks"; no dataset linked
- https://moondream.ai/blog/moondream-3-1-beyond-benchmarks recorded 2026-09-27
"We used Lens, our fine-tuning product: the same hosted API customers use to tune Moondream with SFT and RL"
- https://moondream.ai/licenses/model/1.0 recorded 2026-09-27
"You may not provide Moondream to third parties as a hosted or managed service where that service gives users access to general-purpose Moondream inference or fine-tuning"; commercial use granted
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/m87-labs/moondream/HEAD/README.md recorded 2026-09-27
The repository documents local and cloud inference; no training section
Adoption
4 high confidenceHugging Face downloads over the trailing 30 days, summed across the Moondream 2 and Moondream 3 checkpoints under the vikhyatk and moondream accounts. Nearly all of it is Moondream 2, and the hosted Moondream Cloud is not counted.
- https://huggingface.co/api/models?author=moondream&search=moondream&sort=downloads&direction=-1&limit=100 recorded 2026-09-27
moondream3-preview 115,536, moondream3.1-9B-A2B 14,668 and three Moondream 2 builds totalling 13,358 downloads in the trailing 30 days; the Parakeet speech models are excluded
- https://huggingface.co/api/models?author=vikhyatk&search=moondream&sort=downloads&direction=-1&limit=100 recorded 2026-09-27
vikhyatk/moondream2 with 1,970,584 downloads in the trailing 30 days
Capability
2 high confidenceMoondream reads documents and charts and returns object points and boxes quickly on modest hardware. It works on one image at a time with no video input, which puts it a step below MiniCPM-V.
- https://huggingface.co/moondream/moondream3.1-9B-A2B/raw/main/README.md recorded 2026-09-27
"Skills include query, detect, point, and caption, all native and all returning structured output"
- https://moondream.ai/blog/moondream-3-1-beyond-benchmarks recorded 2026-09-27
ChartQA 86.01, DocVQA 88.6 and COCO detect 81.46 for Moondream 3.1; Qwen3.5 9B 70.72, 92.94 and 75.58
Verified 2026-09-27