LocalAI/README.md

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LocalAI is the open-source AI engine. Run any model - LLMs, vision, voice, image, video - on any hardware. No GPU required.

A small core, not a bundle. Each backend wraps a best-in-class engine (llama.cpp, vLLM, whisper.cpp, stable-diffusion, MLX...) in its own image, pulled only when a model needs it. You install nothing you don't use.

• Composable by design: backends are separate and pulled on demand, so you install only what your model needs
• Open and extensible: load any model, or build your own backend in any language against an open interface
• Drop-in API compatibility: OpenAI, Anthropic, and ElevenLabs APIs across every backend
• Any model, any modality: LLMs, vision, voice, image, and video behind one API
• Any hardware: NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Apple Silicon, Vulkan, or CPU-only
• Multi-user ready: API key auth, user quotas, role-based access
• Built-in AI agents: autonomous agents with tool use, RAG, MCP, and skills
• Privacy-first: your data never leaves your infrastructure

Created by Ettore Di Giacinto and maintained by the LocalAI team.

📖 Documentation | 💬 Discord | 💻 Quickstart | 🖼️ Models | ❓FAQ

Guided tour

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/08cbb692-57da-48f7-963d-2e7b43883c18

Click to see more!

User and auth

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/228fa9ad-81a3-4d43-bfb9-31557e14a36c

Agents

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/6270b331-e21d-4087-a540-6290006b381a

Usage metrics per user

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/cbb03379-23b4-4e3d-bd26-d152f057007f

Fine-tuning and Quantization

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/5ba4ace9-d3df-4795-b7d4-b0b404ea71ee

WebRTC

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/ed88e34c-fed3-4b83-8a67-4716a9feeb7b

Quickstart

macOS

Note: The DMG is not signed by Apple. After installing, run: sudo xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/LocalAI.app. See #6268 for details.

Containers (Docker, podman, ...)

Already ran LocalAI before? Use docker start -i local-ai to restart an existing container.

CPU only:

docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 localai/localai:latest

NVIDIA GPU:

# CUDA 13
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --gpus all localai/localai:latest-gpu-nvidia-cuda-13

# CUDA 12
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --gpus all localai/localai:latest-gpu-nvidia-cuda-12

# NVIDIA Jetson ARM64 (CUDA 12, for AGX Orin and similar)
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --gpus all localai/localai:latest-nvidia-l4t-arm64

# NVIDIA Jetson ARM64 (CUDA 13, for DGX Spark)
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --gpus all localai/localai:latest-nvidia-l4t-arm64-cuda-13

AMD GPU (ROCm):

docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --device=/dev/kfd --device=/dev/dri --group-add=video localai/localai:latest-gpu-hipblas

Intel GPU (oneAPI):

docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --device=/dev/dri/card1 --device=/dev/dri/renderD128 localai/localai:latest-gpu-intel

Vulkan GPU:

docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 localai/localai:latest-gpu-vulkan

Loading models

# From the model gallery (see available models with `local-ai models list` or at https://models.localai.io)
local-ai run llama-3.2-1b-instruct:q4_k_m
# From Huggingface
local-ai run huggingface://TheBloke/phi-2-GGUF/phi-2.Q8_0.gguf
# From the Ollama OCI registry
local-ai run ollama://gemma:2b
# From a YAML config
local-ai run https://gist.githubusercontent.com/.../phi-2.yaml
# From a standard OCI registry (e.g., Docker Hub)
local-ai run oci://localai/phi-2:latest

To test a running LocalAI server from the terminal, open an interactive chat session from another shell. Inside the prompt, /models lists installed models and /model <name> switches between them.

# Terminal 1
local-ai run llama-3.2-1b-instruct:q4_k_m

# Terminal 2
local-ai chat --model llama-3.2-1b-instruct:q4_k_m

Automatic Backend Detection: LocalAI automatically detects your GPU capabilities and downloads the appropriate backend. For advanced options, see GPU Acceleration.

For more details, see the Getting Started guide.

Latest News

• June 2026: New native biometric backends from the LocalAI team: voice-detect.cpp for speaker recognition and voice analysis (ECAPA-TDNN, WeSpeaker, ERes2Net, CAM++, wav2vec2 age/gender/emotion) and face-detect.cpp for face detection, recognition, demographics and anti-spoofing (SCRFD/ArcFace, YuNet/SFace). Both are from-scratch C++/ggml engines with no Python or onnxruntime at inference, self-contained GGUF weights, bit-exact parity with the reference, and GPU cuDNN parity, replacing the heavier Python insightface and speaker-recognition backends (PR #10441).
• June 2026: New realtime voice assistant demo (a tiny Go client for the Realtime API with a full talk-back voice loop and tool calling), plus streaming of the realtime LLM / TTS / transcription pipeline stages and configurable WebRTC ICE candidates.
• June 2026: Big speech push: the parakeet.cpp ASR engine gains NeMo-faithful segment timestamps, a multilingual streaming Nemotron-3.5 model, dynamic batching for concurrent transcription and CUDA graphs; the new CrispASR backend adds multi-architecture ASR + TTS, and 60 Piper TTS voices across 42 languages land in the gallery (plus per-request TTS instructions and params).
• June 2026: New backends and models: locate-anything.cpp for open-vocabulary object detection via ggml, Ideogram4 image generation in stablediffusion-ggml, llama.cpp video input, and the Gemma 4 QAT family with MTP speculative-decoding pairs. Plus an interactive CLI chat mode and RAG source citations in agent responses.
• June 2026: Distributed mode hardening: prefix-cache-aware routing, a production-ready request router with auto-sized embedding/rerank batches, ds4 layer-split distributed inference, NATS JWT auth + TLS/mTLS, and resumable file uploads.
• May 2026: LocalAI 4.3.0 - llama.cpp prompt cache on by default (repeated system prompts collapse from minutes to seconds), keyless cosign signing of backend OCI images, per-API-key + per-user usage attribution, Distributed v3 with per-request replica routing. Release notes
• May 2026: LocalAI 4.2.0 - LocalAI sees and hears: voice recognition, face recognition + antispoofing liveness, speaker diarization. Plus drop-in Ollama API, video generation, redesigned UI with i18n + admin-configurable branding, vLLM at feature parity with llama.cpp, and 11 new backends. Release notes
• April 2026: LocalAI 4.1.0 - LocalAI becomes a control tower: distributed cluster mode with VRAM-aware smart routing + autoscaling, multi-user platform with OIDC and API keys, per-user quotas with predictive analytics, in-UI fine-tuning with TRL (auto-export to GGUF), on-the-fly quantization backend, visual pipeline editor. Release notes
• March 2026: LocalAI 4.0.0 - native agentic orchestration with the new Agenthub community hub, full React UI rewrite with Canvas mode, MCP Apps + client-side with tool streaming, WebRTC realtime audio, MLX-distributed. Release notes
• February 2026: Realtime API for audio-to-audio with tool calling, ACE-Step 1.5 support
• January 2026: LocalAI 3.10.0 — Anthropic API support, Open Responses API, video & image generation (LTX-2), unified GPU backends, tool streaming, Moonshine, Pocket-TTS. Release notes
• December 2025: Dynamic Memory Resource reclaimer, Automatic multi-GPU model fitting (llama.cpp), Vibevoice backend
• November 2025: Import models via URL, Multiple chats and history
• October 2025: Model Context Protocol (MCP) support for agentic capabilities
• September 2025: New Launcher for macOS and Linux, extended backend support for Mac and Nvidia L4T, MLX-Audio, WAN 2.2
• August 2025: MLX, MLX-VLM, Diffusers, llama.cpp now supported on Apple Silicon
• July 2025: All backends migrated outside the main binary — lightweight, modular architecture

For older news and full release notes, see GitHub Releases and the News page.

Features

• Text generation (llama.cpp, transformers, vllm ... and more)
• Text to Audio
• Audio to Text
• Image generation
• OpenAI-compatible tools API
• Realtime API (Speech-to-speech)
• Embeddings generation
• Constrained grammars
• Download models from Huggingface
• Vision API
• Object Detection
• Reranker API
• P2P Inferencing
• Distributed Mode — Horizontal scaling with PostgreSQL + NATS
• Model Context Protocol (MCP)
• Built-in Agents — Autonomous AI agents with tool use, RAG, skills, SSE streaming, and Agent Hub
• Backend Gallery — Install/remove backends on the fly via OCI images
• Voice Activity Detection (Silero-VAD)
• Integrated WebUI

Supported Backends & Acceleration

LocalAI supports 60+ backends including llama.cpp, vLLM, SGLang, transformers, whisper.cpp, diffusers, MLX, MLX-VLM, and many more. Hardware acceleration is available for NVIDIA (CUDA 12/13), AMD (ROCm), Intel (oneAPI/SYCL), Apple Silicon (Metal), Vulkan, and NVIDIA Jetson (L4T). All backends can be installed on-the-fly from the Backend Gallery.

See the full Backend & Model Compatibility Table and GPU Acceleration guide.

Backends built by us

Most backends wrap a best-in-class upstream engine. A handful of them are native C/C++/GGML engines (no Python at inference) developed and maintained by the LocalAI project itself:

Backend	What it does
parakeet.cpp	C++/GGML port of NVIDIA NeMo Parakeet ASR (tdt/ctc/rnnt/hybrid), with cache-aware streaming transcription
ced.cpp	C++/GGML port of the CED audio-tagging models: sound-event classification (527-class AudioSet) over REST and the realtime API for live recognition
voxtral.c	Voxtral Realtime 4B speech-to-text in pure C
vibevoice.cpp	Native port of Microsoft VibeVoice for TTS (voice cloning) and long-form ASR with speaker diarization
rf-detr.cpp	Native RF-DETR object detection and instance segmentation
locate-anything.cpp	Open-vocabulary object detection and visual grounding (LocateAnything-3B)
depth-anything.cpp	Depth Anything 3 monocular metric depth + camera pose estimation
privacy-filter.cpp	Standalone GGML PII/NER token-classification engine powering LocalAI's PII redaction tier
LocalVQE	Joint acoustic echo cancellation, noise suppression, and dereverberation
local-store	Local-first vector database for embeddings (shipped in-tree)

We also maintain apex-quant, a per-tensor, per-layer quantization recipe for Mixture-of-Experts models that exploits their structural sparsity to produce GGUFs matching or beating Q8_0 quality - and they run out of the box on stock llama.cpp.

Resources

• Documentation
• LLM fine-tuning guide
• Build from source
• Kubernetes installation
• Integrations & community projects
• Installation video walkthrough
• Media & blog posts
• Examples — including the realtime voice assistant demo (Go client for the Realtime API with tool calling)

Team

LocalAI is maintained by a small team of humans, together with the wider community of contributors.

• Ettore Di Giacinto — original author and project lead
• Richard Palethorpe — maintainer

A huge thank you to everyone who contributes code, reviews PRs, files issues, and helps users in Discord — LocalAI is a community-driven project and wouldn't exist without you. See the full contributors list.

Citation

If you utilize this repository, data in a downstream project, please consider citing it with:

@misc{localai,
  author = {Ettore Di Giacinto},
  title = {LocalAI: The free, Open source OpenAI alternative},
  year = {2023},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  journal = {GitHub repository},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/go-skynet/LocalAI}},

Sponsors

Do you find LocalAI useful?

Support the project by becoming a backer or sponsor. Your logo will show up here with a link to your website.

A huge thank you to our generous sponsors who support this project covering CI expenses, and our Sponsor list:

Past sponsors

Individual sponsors

A special thanks to individual sponsors, a full list is on GitHub and buymeacoffee. Special shout out to drikster80 for being generous. Thank you everyone!

Star history

License

LocalAI is a community-driven project created by Ettore Di Giacinto and maintained by the LocalAI team.

MIT - Author Ettore Di Giacinto mudler@localai.io

Acknowledgements

LocalAI couldn't have been built without the help of great software already available from the community. Thank you!

• llama.cpp
• https://github.com/tatsu-lab/stanford_alpaca
• https://github.com/cornelk/llama-go for the initial ideas
• https://github.com/antimatter15/alpaca.cpp
• https://github.com/EdVince/Stable-Diffusion-NCNN
• https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp
• https://github.com/rhasspy/piper
• exo for the MLX distributed auto-parallel sharding implementation

Contributors

This is a community project, a special thanks to our contributors!