Tendem
Mini toolsFastVLM
By Apple
FastVLM brings Apple’s focus on responsiveness to multimodal reasoning. A compact vision encoder is paired with a streamlined language backbone, so the model can “look and read” documents, dashboards, photos, or UI screenshots and respond almost immediately with precise, grounded text. It handles layout-aware OCR, small fonts, and fine visual details, then ties them back to instructions so answers feel reliable rather than generic. The interface mirrors Apple’s developer patterns: long-context prompts to keep multi-image threads coherent, structured outputs for automation, and function calls that let agents crop regions, fetch metadata, or hand results to downstream tools. Because it’s tuned for efficiency, FastVLM fits latency-sensitive scenarios—on-device previews, customer support over screenshots, lightweight document QA—yet remains accurate enough for production assistants. Teams adopt it when they want practical visual understanding with the speed to keep a conversation flowing and the discipline to produce outputs that slot directly into apps and workflows.
Text
Gen 3
Overview
FastVLM is Apple’s lightweight vision-language model built for real-time multimodal apps. It ingests images alongside text and returns grounded answers fast—OCR, charts/diagrams, screenshots, and general visual QA—while supporting long context, tool/function calling, and structured JSON outputs.
About Apple
Industry:
Technology, Information and Media
Company Size:
12000
Location:
Cupertino, California, US
Website:
apple.com
Last updated: October 14, 2025
