While running AI models on your own device can be difficult as these models are often computationally demanding, it also offers significant benefits: including improved privacy since your data stays on your machine, and enhanced speed and reliability because you're not dependent on an internet connection or external servers. This is where tools like Optimum Intel and OpenVINO come in, along with a small, efficient model like SmolVLM. In this blog post, we'll walk you through three easy steps to get a VLM running locally, with no expensive hardware or GPUs required (though you can run all the code samples from this blog post on Intel GPUs).

Small models like SmolVLM are built for low-resource consumption, but they can be further optimized. In this blog post we will see how to optimize your model, to lower memory usage and speedup inference, making it more efficient for deployment on devices with limited resources.

To follow this tutorial, you need to install optimum and openvino, which you can do with:

First, you will need to convert your model to the OpenVINO IR. There are multiple options to do it:

Now it’s time to optimize your model. Quantization reduces the precision of the model weights and/or activations, leading to smaller, faster models. Essentially, it's a way to map values from a high-precision data type, such as 32-bit floating-point numbers (FP32), to a lower-precision format, typically 8-bit integers (INT8). While this process offers several key benefits, it can also impact in a potential loss of accuracy.

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