VentureBeat October 28, 2024
Moondream emerged from stealth mode today with $4.5 million in pre-seed funding and a radical proposition: when it comes to AI models, smaller is better. The startup, backed by Felicis Ventures, Microsoft’s M12 GitHub Fund, and Ascend, has built a vision-language model that operates with just 1.6 billion parameters yet rivals the performance of models four times its size.
The company’s open-source model has already captured significant attention, logging over 2 million downloads and 5,100 GitHub stars. “What makes it special is that it is one of the tiniest models that is peculiar in its high accuracy, and it works just really well,” said Jay Allen, Moondream’s CEO and former AWS tech director. “It can run everywhere really easily and...