# Moondream 3 Arrives in Preview Release

> The next generation of the efficient, open-source vision-language model is now available for early testing and feedback.

Published by The Open Weights on Sep 11, 2025. Canonical: https://theopenweights.com/news/moondream-3-jbiz

## Key facts

- Company: moondream
- Model: Moondream 3 (preview)
- Version: 3-preview
- Category: Vision-Language
- Modalities: Vision-Language
- License: Other (Open weights, commercial use allowed)
- Architecture: HfMoondream
- Precision: BF16
- Weights size: 18.5 GB
- Significance: notable
- Published: 2025-09-11
- Last verified: 2026-06-17
- Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/moondream/moondream3-preview
- Canonical URL: https://theopenweights.com/news/moondream-3-jbiz

A preview version of Moondream 3, the next iteration of the compact and efficient vision-language model, has been released. Continuing the series' focus on performance in a small footprint, this new model is designed for a variety of image understanding tasks where resource constraints are a key consideration.

## A New Architecture

Moondream 3 represents a significant architectural update. The model, which has around 4 billion parameters, is built on two powerful open components: a SigLIP vision encoder for image processing and Microsoft's recently released Phi-3-mini for its language understanding and generation capabilities. According to the release notes, the model was trained from scratch on a new dataset.

The project's goal is to provide a capable but lightweight alternative to the massive vision models released by major labs. By combining best-in-class open components, Moondream 3 aims to deliver strong performance without requiring extensive computational resources, making it suitable for on-device or edge applications.

This release is explicitly a preview intended to gather community feedback for future improvements. Developers can explore the model's capabilities on its [Hugging Face repository](https://huggingface.co/moondream/moondream3-preview). It is available for use under a custom 'Moondream license,' which users should review before implementation.

## Get the model

- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/moondream/moondream3-preview)

## Sources

- [moondream/moondream3-preview](https://huggingface.co/moondream/moondream3-preview) — Hugging Face, Sep 11, 2025

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Source: The Open Weights (https://theopenweights.com/). Aggregated and written by Claude, curated by humans. Cite as: "Moondream 3 Arrives in Preview Release", The Open Weights, Sep 11, 2025, https://theopenweights.com/news/moondream-3-jbiz