Molmo
Ai2's open vision-language model family trained on the fully open PixMo dataset, with pointing ability.
About
Molmo demonstrated that fully open training data could rival closed vision-language models: Ai2 released the family alongside PixMo, a collection of eight datasets for dense captioning, instruction tuning, grounding, and counting built without distilling from proprietary VLMs. Models span MolmoE-1B, a 7B-total mixture-of-experts with 1B active parameters, the dense Molmo-7B-O and Molmo-7B-D, and Molmo-72B, which Ai2 reported comparing favorably with GPT-4o on academic benchmarks and human preference at its 2024 debut. A distinctive capability is pointing: the models can output image coordinates, enabling counting and UI-grounding tasks most VLMs cannot do. The GitHub repository holds the Apache-2.0 modeling, training, and evaluation code released in December 2024, with checkpoints on Hugging Face and the PixMo datasets published separately. Everything needed to reproduce or extend the models is public, which remains rare among VLM releases. Serving the 7B variants needs a mid-range GPU, while the 72B model calls for multi-GPU hardware, and the 7B models are the most widely used in practice.
Should you use Molmo?
Pick it when
Pick this when you need a vision-language model whose training data is fully public, or a task that needs pointing: counting objects or grounding UI elements by returning image coordinates. The 7B variants run on a mid-range GPU.
Look elsewhere when
Skip it for OCR-heavy documents or long multi-image chats: InternVL 2.5 targets OCR and charts, and Pixtral handles multi-image conversations over 128K context. On edge devices, Moondream also does pointing in a much smaller package.
Alternatives to Molmo
- Moondream
Also outputs points plus detection boxes and runs on CPUs or small GPUs, but 3.x weights use a BSL-derived license instead of Apache-2.0.
- InternVL 2.5
MIT licensed and aimed at OCR, chart and table reading, and multi-image reasoning, which suits document work better than Molmo.
- Pixtral
Apache-2.0 12B with 128K context for multi-image, multi-turn chats, but its training data is not released the way PixMo is.
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Details
- Category
- Large Language Models (LLMs)
- Price
- Free
- Platform
- Local/Desktop
- Difficulty
- Intermediate (3/5)
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Added
- Jul 29, 2026