Model reference · open weights

clip-vit-patch32

Embeddings openai Image embed 1 build Licence not stated 20.4M dl/mo

clip-vit-patch32 is an open-weight embedding model from OpenAI. clip-vit-base-patch32 (BF16) weighs 605 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

clip-vit-patch32 is a zero-shot image classification model developed by OpenAI and published as openai/clip-vit-base-patch32. It utilizes a ViT-B/32 Transformer architecture for image encoding and a masked self-attention Transformer for text encoding, trained on publicly available image-caption data. The model is intended for research purposes to explore robustness and generalization in computer vision tasks and is limited to English language use cases.

Summary of the openai/clip-vit-base-patch32 model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byOpenAI
TypeEmbedding models
TaskImage embed
Runs withtransformers
Released2022-03-02
Popularity20.4M downloads / month
Weights605 MB (clip-vit-base-patch32 (BF16), file size)
LicenceLicence not stated

What it runs on

Memory and cards for clip-vit-base-patch32 (BF16)

Weights 605 MB (file size) · overhead about 1.1 GB.

CardRunsCounted
memory
RTX 3060 12 GBfits11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GBfits15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GBfits31.0 GB
L40S 48 GBfits44.0 GB
A100 80 GBfits78.2 GB
H100 80 GBfits78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GBfits93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unifiedfits107 GB
H200 141 GBfits138 GB
B200 180 GBfits176 GB

Estimates, not measurements: the weights are the build's file size. No cache grows with use; a batch of inputs needs working memory of its own. Counted memory is 92 % of what CUDA reports for the card.

From the model card

What OpenAI says about clip-vit-patch32

Read the model card

Disclaimer: The model card is taken and modified from the official CLIP repository, it can be found here.

Model Details

The CLIP model was developed by researchers at OpenAI to learn about what contributes to robustness in computer vision tasks. The model was also developed to test the ability of models to generalize to arbitrary image classification tasks in a zero-shot manner. It was not developed for general model deployment - to deploy models like CLIP, researchers will first need to carefully study their capabilities in relation to the specific context they’re being deployed within.

Model Date

January 2021

Model Type

The model uses a ViT-B/32 Transformer architecture as an image encoder and uses a masked self-attention Transformer as a text encoder. These encoders are trained to maximize the similarity of (image, text) pairs via a contrastive loss.

The original implementation had two variants: one using a ResNet image encoder and the other using a Vision Transformer. This repository has the variant with the Vision Transformer.

Documents

Use with Transformers

from PIL import Image
import requests

from transformers import CLIPProcessor, CLIPModel

model = CLIPModel.from_pretrained("openai/clip-vit-base-patch32")
processor = CLIPProcessor.from_pretrained("openai/clip-vit-base-patch32")

url = "http://images.cocodataset.org/val2017/000000039769.jpg"
image = Image.open(requests.get(url, stream=True).raw)

inputs = processor(text=["a photo of a cat", "a photo of a dog"], images=image, return_tensors="pt", padding=True)

outputs = model(**inputs)
logits_per_image = outputs.logits_per_image # this is the image-text similarity score
probs = logits_per_image.softmax(dim=1) # we can take the softmax to get the label probabilities

Model Use

Intended Use

The model is intended as a research output for research communities. We hope that this model will enable researchers to better understand and explore zero-shot, arbitrary image classification. We also hope it can be used for interdisciplinary studies of the potential impact of such models - the CLIP paper includes a discussion of potential downstream impacts to provide an example for this sort of analysis.

Primary intended uses

The primary intended users of these models are AI researchers.

We primarily imagine the model will be used by researchers to better understand robustness, generalization, and other capabilities, biases, and constraints of computer vision models.

Out-of-Scope Use Cases

Any deployed use case of the model - whether commercial or not - is currently out of scope. Non-deployed use cases such as image search in a constrained environment, are also not recommended unless there is thorough in-domain testing of the model with a specific, fixed class taxonomy. This is because our safety assessment demonstrated a high need for task specific testing especially given the variability of CLIP’s performance with different class taxonomies. This makes untested and unconstrained deployment of the model in any use case currently potentially harmful.

Certain use cases which would fall under the domain of surveillance and facial recognition are always out-of-scope regardless of performance of the model. This is because the use of artificial intelligence for tasks such as these can be premature currently given the lack of testing norms and checks to ensure its fair use.

Since the model has not been purposefully trained in or evaluated on any languages other than English, its use should be limited to English language use cases.

Data

The model was trained on publicly available image-caption data. This was done through a combination of crawling a handful of websites and using commonly-used pre-existing image datasets such as YFCC100M. A large portion of the data comes from our crawling of the internet. This means that the data is more representative of people and societies most connected to the internet which tend to skew towards more developed nations, and younger, male users.

Data Mission Statement

Our goal with building this dataset was to test out robustness and generalizability in computer vision tasks. As a result, the focus was on gathering large quantities of data from different publicly-available internet data sources. The data was gathered in a mostly non-interventionist manner. However, we only crawled websites that had policies against excessively violent and adult images and allowed us to filter out such content. We do not intend for this dataset to be used as the basis for any commercial or deployed model and will not be releasing the dataset.

Performance and Limitations

Performance

We have evaluated the performance of CLIP on a wide range of benchmarks across a variety of computer vision datasets such as OCR to texture recognition to fine-grained classification. The paper describes model performance on the following datasets:

  • Food101
  • CIFAR10
  • CIFAR100
  • Birdsnap
  • SUN397
  • Stanford Cars
  • FGVC Aircraft
  • VOC2007
  • DTD
  • Oxford-IIIT Pet dataset
  • Caltech101
  • Flowers102
  • MNIST
  • SVHN
  • IIIT5K
  • Hateful Memes
  • SST-2
  • UCF101
  • Kinetics700
  • Country211
  • CLEVR Counting
  • KITTI Distance
  • STL-10
  • RareAct
  • Flickr30
  • MSCOCO
  • ImageNet
  • ImageNet-A
  • ImageNet-R
  • ImageNet Sketch
  • ObjectNet (ImageNet Overlap)
  • Youtube-BB
  • ImageNet-Vid

Limitations

CLIP and our analysis of it have a number of limitations. CLIP currently struggles with respect to certain tasks such as fine grained classification and counting objects. CLIP also poses issues with regards to fairness and bias which we discuss in the paper and briefly in the next section. Additionally, our approach to testing CLIP also has an important limitation- in many cases we have used l

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face — the full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

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