AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to SmolDocling
256M VLM for end-to-end document AI
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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How small can a language model be while still doing something useful? I wanted to find out, and had some spare time over the holidays. Z80-μLM is a character-level language model with 2-bit quantized weights ({-2,-1,0,+1}) that runs on a Z80 with 64KB RAM. The entire thing: inference, weights, chat UI, it all fits in a 40KB .COM file that you can run in a CP/M emulator and hopefully even real hardware! It won't write your emails, but it can be trained to play a stripped down version of 20 Questions, and is sometimes able to maintain the illusion of having simple but terse conversations…
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Branchable computing by using a portable, lightweight, self-contained virtual machine - smol-machines/smolvm
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Ultracite v6▲252Opinionated, zero-config code linter and formatter
Nov 2025 · ultracite.ai · its alternatives →
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Megaparse [LW24]▲289Open-source Document Parser to Markdown with OCR/LLMs
2024 · megaparse.com · its alternatives →
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Build your own high performance LLM inference engine in C++ and CUDA - a smaller version of vLLM - jmaczan/tiny-vllm
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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PrismML builds 1-bit and ternary Bonsai models that pack advanced reasoning, tool use, and multimodal AI into phones, laptops, and efficient data centers.
Mar 2026 · prismml.com · its alternatives →
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💥 Fast State-of-the-Art Tokenizers optimized for Research and Production - huggingface/tokenizers
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
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SmolAgents▲263Powerful AI agents, minimal code, on Hugging Face framework
2025 · smolagents.org · its alternatives →
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Ultra-efficient 1.3B vision-language model for mobile
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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MiniMax M2.5▲194The first open model to beat Sonnet made for productivity
Feb 2026 · minimax.io · its alternatives →
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Min.js Style Compression of Tech Docs for LLM Context - marv1nnnnn/llm-min.txt
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I've developed a Python API service that uses GPT-4o for OCR on PDFs. It features parallel processing and batch handling for improved performance. Not only does it convert PDF to markdown, but it also describes the images within the PDF using captions like `[Image: This picture shows 4 people waving]`. In testing with NASA's Apollo 17 flight documents, it successfully converted complex, multi-oriented pages into well-structured Markdown. The project is open-source and available on GitHub. Feedback is welcome.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I discovered that in LLM inference, keys and values in the KV cache have very different quantization sensitivities. Keys need higher precision than values to maintain quality. I patched llama.cpp to enable different bit-widths for keys vs. values on Apple Silicon. The results are surprising: - K8V4 (8-bit keys, 4-bit values): 59% memory reduction with only 0.86% perplexity loss - K4V8 (4-bit keys, 8-bit values): 59% memory reduction but 6.06% perplexity loss - The configurations use the same number of bits, but K8V4 is 7× better for quality This means you can run LLMs with 2-3× longer…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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RISC-V's compressed instruction (RVC) extension is intended as an add-on to the regular, 32-bit instruction set, not a replacement or competitor. Its designers intended RVC instructions to be expanded into regular 32-bit RV32I equivalents via a pre-decoder. What happens if we explicitly architect a RISC-V CPU to execute RVC instructions, and "mop up" any RV32I instructions that aren't convenient via a microcode layer? What architectural optimizations are unlocked as a result? "Minimax" is an experimental RISC-V implementation intended to establish if an RVC-optimized CPU is, in practice, any…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Peter Hrynkow - Vancouver Tech Leader
2015 · peterhrynkow.com · its alternatives →
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📄 PDF/IMG ->.MD/JSON Document OCR API for PaddleOCR and GLMOCR. Self-hostable. - majcheradam/ocrbase
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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superfill.ai▲73Stop typing. Start autofilling with Superfill.AI.
Dec 2025 · superfill.ai · its alternatives →
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MiniCPM5-1B▲96A new SOTA for compact open models on the edge
May 2026 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
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Vision models have been gaining popularity as a replacement for traditional OCR. Especially with Gemini 2.0 becoming cost competitive with the cloud platforms. We've been continuously evaluating different models since we released the Zerox package last year (https://github.com/getomni-ai/zerox). And we wanted to put some numbers behind it. So we’re open sourcing our internal OCR benchmark + evaluation datasets. Full writeup + data explorer here: https://getomni.ai/ocr-benchmark Github: https://github.com/getomni-ai/benchmark Huggingface:…
2025 · getomni.ai · its alternatives →
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TinyPNG▲119Compress PNG images that preserves full alpha transparency
2014 · tinypng.com · its alternatives →
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Contribute to libriscv/drogon-sandbox development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →