Hugging Face Says Its New Robotics Model Is so Efficient It Can Run on a MacBook

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.

Hugging Face Releases SmolVLA: A Compact Vision-Language-Action Model for Affordable and Efficient Robotics

Despite recent progress in robotic control via large-scale vision-language-action (VLA) models, real-world deployment remains constrained by hardware and data requirements. Most VLA models depend on transformer-based backbones with billions of parameters, resulting in significant memory and compute costs. This limits experimentation to well-resourced labs and clouds, excluding practitioners working with lower-cost hardware. Additionally, much of…