MiniCPM-V 4.6 goes viral after open source release! Hits Hugging Face Trending Top 2, free API now open

2026-05-19

On May 11, ModelBest, together with Tsinghua University and OpenBMB, released and open-sourced MiniCPM-V 4.6 — and the release instantly ignited developers' enthusiasm worldwide.

After open-sourcing, it quickly rose to No. 2 on the Hugging Face Trending list (Trending No.2), and total downloads across platforms surpassed 250,000 in its first week!

According to data from the Hugging Face search page, as of May 19, MiniCPM-V 4.6 had about 274,000 downloads in total across Hugging Face (69 repositories, about 259,000 downloads) and ModelScope (21 repositories, about 15,000 downloads).

Now MiniCPM-V 4.6 officially offers a free API, making it easier for developers to call the model and further unleashing the possibilities of an efficient model that thrives both on-device and in the cloud!

➤ Get the free API

🔗 https://github.com/OpenBMB/MiniCPM-V/blob/main/docs/api.md

Why is everyone rushing to download it? How powerful is this "small but mighty" model?

As the smallest model by parameter count in MiniCPM-V family history, version 4.6 perfectly embodies the idea of "achieving more with less."

In one sentence: smaller, stronger, faster — redefining the "intelligence density" of 1B-class models.

Performance that punches above its class: With only 1.3B parameters, its overall multimodal capability beats Alibaba's Qwen3.5-0.8B and Google's Gemma4-E2B-it across the board.

An efficiency miracle with blazing inference: Its vLLM-based throughput is 1.5× that of Qwen3.5-0.8B. It needs very little memory to run smoothly on your phone or thin-and-light laptop.

Architectural innovation for extreme efficiency: It adopts the latest LLaVA-UHD v4 architecture, cutting image-encoding compute by 50%; breaking with convention, it also offers hybrid 4× / 16× visual token compression.

Developer-friendly: the free API is now fully open!

Open-sourcing the model is only the first step; the key is letting everyone use it at a lower cost.

So that every geek, university team, and startup can experience the appeal of a 1.3B multimodal foundation model with zero barrier to entry, MiniCPM-V 4.6 now officially offers a free API!

Bringing AI intelligence to every screen and every device is our vision and our mission.

To date, the cumulative open-source downloads of ModelBest's "small but mighty" series have surpassed 30 million.

Behind this milestone are the downloads, hands-on trials, and feedback from every developer. Thank you for your support! ❤️

MiniCPM-V 4.6 is now fully open-source across the stack. Take these links and join more than 200,000 developers in exploring the endless possibilities of on-device multimodal AI!

➤ Get the free API

🔗 https://github.com/OpenBMB/MiniCPM-V/blob/main/docs/api.md

➤ Download and deployment links:

Hugging Face:

🔗 https://huggingface.co/openbmb/MiniCPM-V-4.6

GitHub:

🔗 https://github.com/OpenBMB/MiniCPM-V

ModelScope:

🔗 https://modelscope.cn/models/OpenBMB/MiniCPM-V-4.6

Web Demo:

🔗 https://huggingface.co/spaces/openbmb/MiniCPM-V-4.6-Demo

APP Demo: