Model reference · open weights
moondream3.1 is an open-weight language model from moondream. AxForge deploys and operates it for you on dedicated EU-owned hardware — with the licence handled where one is required.
Available as managed deployment — configured and operated for you on dedicated EU hardware, quoted per deployment.
What it is
| Released by | moondream |
|---|---|
| Type | Language models |
| Task | Vision + text · MoE |
| Parameters (lead) | 9.3B |
| Released | 2026-06-30 |
| Popularity | 11k downloads / month |
| Licence | Commercial licence needed |
About
Moondream 3.1 is a vision language model with a mixture-of-experts architecture (9B total parameters, 2B active). It delivers state-of-the-art visual reasoning and detection while staying fast and cheap to deploy. Skills include query, detect, point, and caption, all native and all returning structured output.
For the full story on what's new — including how we trained it and how it holds up on your own tasks — see the release notes.
Photon is Moondream's high-performance inference engine. It runs the model locally on NVIDIA GPUs (Ampere or newer) and Apple Silicon Macs, with the same API as Moondream Cloud.
pip install moondream
import moondream as md
from PIL import Image
# Runs locally via Photon. Weights download from Hugging Face on first use.
model = md.vl(local=True, model="moondream3.1-9B-A2B")
image = Image.open("photo.jpg")
# Caption
print(model.caption(image)["caption"])
# Visual question answering
print(model.query(image, "What's in this image?")["answer"])
# Open-vocabulary detection
for obj in model.detect(image, "person")["objects"]:
print(obj)
# Pointing
for point in model.point(image, "person")["points"]:
print(point)
No API key is required to run the base model locally. (You'll only need one to run finetunes or to call Moondream Cloud.) For supported hardware, streaming, finetunes, and production serving with Triton, see the local inference guide.
Prefer a hosted endpoint? The same skills are available through Moondream Cloud with a generous free tier. See the quickstart to make your first call.
Moondream 3.1 is released under the Moondream Model License.
From the published model card. Full card on the HuggingFace links in the sidebar.
How it works
Using it via the API
Once AxForge deploys moondream3-1 for you, it answers on the OpenAI-compatible API — the same base URL and keys as every other model. (moondream3-1 below is illustrative; you get the exact model name on deployment.)
$ curl -sS https://api.axforge.ai/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $AXFORGE_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"model":"moondream3-1","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello"}]}'
Create an account — your API key is available in the console. 3M free tokens every 30 days with every new account.