Overview
Moondream is an open-weight family of Vision Language Models (VLMs) built for powerful, efficient visual reasoning. The Moondream 3 family uses a mixture-of-experts architecture with grounded visual reasoning, a 32k context window, and native support for multiple vision skills—like pointing, counting, and object detection—all designed with a deployment-friendly ethos.
For local inference, Photon exposes Moondream, Qwen, Gemma, and speech-to-text models including Whisper, Qwen3-ASR, and Parakeet through the Moondream Python package. For hosted inference, choose a model through the Cloud API quickstart.
Key stats
- 9B total params, 2B active params (maintains similar inference speeds to our previous models)
- 32k context window (up from 2k)
Model Skills
Moondream has built-in vision-specific skills that make it easy to generate specific types of vision outputs (e.g., bounding boxes, or 2D points). These are:
- Object Detection
- Pointing and Counting
- Visual Question Answering
- Captioning
- Image Segmentation
Performance Benchmarks
Selected benchmark results are shown alongside larger frontier models for comparison. Moondream is designed to produce strong results with substantially lower inference cost.
| Task | Moondream 3 Preview | GPT 5 | Gemini 2.5-Flash | Claude 4 Sonnet |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Object Detection | ||||
| RefCOCOg | 88.6 | 49.8 | 75.1 | 26.2 |
| RefCOCO+ | 81.8 | 46.3 | 70.2 | 23.4 |
| RefCOCO | 91.1 | 57.2 | 75.8 | 30.1 |
| Counting | ||||
| CountBenchQA | 93.2 | 89.3 | 81.2 | 90.1 |
| Document Understanding | ||||
| ChartQA | 86.6 | 85* | 79.5 | 74.3* |
| DocVQA | 88.3 | 89* | 94.2 | 89.5* |
| Hallucination (higher is better) | ||||
| POPE | 89.0 | 88.4 | 88.1 | 84.6 |
License
Copyright (c) 2025 M87 Labs, Inc. This distribution includes Model Weights licensed under the Business Source License 1.1 with an Additional Use Grant (No Third-Party Service). Commercial hosting or rehosting requires an agreement with contact@m87.ai.
Learn more
- Try the interactive demo
- Full technical specifications for Moondream 3
- Browse legacy versions of Moondream
- Get started with our Getting Started guide