Hugging Face has announced that Jun Kim, the creator and maintainer of oMLX, is joining the company to support the MLX community. According to Hugging Face, the transition allows oMLX to graduate from a side job into a fully maintained and funded project, enabling Kim to better guide contributors and build for the long term while keeping oMLX under the Apache 2.0 license. MLX serves as Apple's framework for local AI optimized for Apple Silicon, and Hugging Face has positioned its Hub as a central repository for MLX models and contributions. By bringing Kim on board, Hugging Face intends to unblock the community to run local AI in various forms and use oMLX as a testbed for new ideas. The company plans to leverage foundational dependencies like mlx-lm and mlx-vlm, and strengthen relationships with project maintainers and their teams. Concretely, a primary focus area for the team will be facilitating the quick transition from a transformers model definition to a reference MLX implementation that can be utilized by different engines. Hugging Face states that this effort is designed to streamline the process of making new transformers models run on MLX, reinforcing its commitment to a healthy and collaborative open-source local AI ecosystem.
Jun Kim, oMLX creator and maintainer, joins Hugging Face to support the MLX community
Jun Kim, the creator and maintainer of oMLX, has joined the Hugging Face team to support the MLX community. In this new role, Kim will transition oMLX from a side project to a fully funded and maintained endeavor, while keeping the project under the Apache 2.0 license. Hugging Face aims to strengthen the local AI ecosystem by supporting Apple's MLX framework and helping streamline the transition from transformers model definitions to MLX implementations.
Why it matters
This move provides dedicated funding and maintenance for key local AI tools like oMLX, potentially accelerating the development and integration of Apple Silicon-optimized models across the industry.
Topic dossiers Hugging Face