moondream System Requirements (CPU, RAM, Disk)

moondream is a tiny yet capable open-source vision-language model (VLM) designed to run on consumer hardware without a GPU. Powered by a SigLIP vision encoder and Phi-2 language model, it handles image captioning, visual question answering, OCR, and object recognition in just ~2GB of RAM. Installation is one pip command, inference takes seconds on CPU, and it's fully Apache-2.0 licensed. Perfect for privacy-sensitive applications, on-device photo analysis, content moderation, and accessibility tools. The community Docker image (ilopezluna/moondream) provides an HTTP API for easy integration. With 9.8k+ GitHub stars, it's one of the most popular lightweight VLMs available.