AI dev platform Hugging Face released an open AI model for robotics called SmolVLA. Trained on “compatibly licensed,” community-shared datasets, SmolVLA outperforms much larger models for robotics in both virtual and real-world environments, Hugging Face claims. “SmolVLA aims to democratize access to vision-language-action [VLA] models and accelerate research toward generalist robotic agents,” writes Hugging Face. “SmolVLA is not only a lightweight yet capable model, but also a method for training and evaluating generalist robotics [technologies].” Hugging Face claims that SmolVLA is small enough to run on a single consumer GPU — or even a MacBook — and can be tested and deployed on “affordable” hardware, including the company’s own robotics systems. SmolVLA also supports an “asynchronous inference stack,” which Hugging Face says allows the model to separate the processing of a robot’s actions from the processing of what it sees and hears. As the company explains, “[b]ecause of this separation, robots can respond more quickly in fast-changing environments.” SmolVLA is available for download from Hugging Face.