Uploaded September 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Should you be using Liquid AI’s new vision-language model (LFM2-VL)?
Here’s my quick take 👇
• Open-weight multimodal models (450M & 1.6B params) for edge devices → support text + image inputs with a 32K context
• Built on LFM2 base, trained with 100B multimodal tokens, fusing vision + language mid-training and refined with supervised image understanding
• Strong on efficient multimodal fusion: high-res image processing without distortion, up to 2x faster GPU inference than InternVL3 & SmolVLM2
• Limitations:
– Not trained for tool use (unlike Gemma)
– Low MMMU scores, generalization concerns
– Alternatives like Gemma or OmniVLM may be faster/better depending on task
Interesting for offline multimodal apps on smaller hardware, but not clear it’s a breakthrough vs other small open models
My verdict → promising for efficiency research, but I wouldn’t switch my stack from Gemma or other strong baselines just yet.
Do you agree? What do you think of Liquid AI’s approach?
I’m Louis-François — PhD dropout, now CTO & co-founder at Towards AI. Follow me for tomorrow’s no-BS AI roundup 🚀
#ai #liquidai #vlm #multimodal #edgeai #opensource #gemma #aicommunity #short
Should you be using Liquid AI’s new vision-language model (LFM2-VL)?
Here’s my quick take 👇
• Open-weight multimodal models (450M & 1.6B params) for edge devices → support text + image inputs with a 32K context
• Built on LFM2 base, trained with 100B multimodal tokens, fusing vision + language mid-training and refined with supervised image understanding
• Strong on efficient multimodal fusion: high-res image processing without distortion, up to 2x faster GPU inference than InternVL3 & SmolVLM2
• Limitations:
– Not trained for tool use (unlike Gemma)
– Low MMMU scores, generalization concerns
– Alternatives like Gemma or OmniVLM may be faster/better depending on task
Interesting for offline multimodal apps on smaller hardware, but not clear it’s a breakthrough vs other small open models
My verdict → promising for efficiency research, but I wouldn’t switch my stack from Gemma or other strong baselines just yet.
Do you agree? What do you think of Liquid AI’s approach?
I’m Louis-François — PhD dropout, now CTO & co-founder at Towards AI. Follow me for tomorrow’s no-BS AI roundup 🚀
#ai #liquidai #vlm #multimodal #edgeai #opensource #gemma #aicommunity #short
