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mlfoundations
open_clip
Python2021–2024
mlfoundations / open_clip

open_clip

An open source implementation of CLIP.

11Distinct people
13Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
14.3KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

An open source implementation of CLIP.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 4:00:59 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year13 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2021-07-31 19:58:51 UTC to 2024-09-26 06:43:05 UTC.

02462021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 2 submissions, 4 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC624

What Hacker News says

6 sources
The part of CLIP[1] that you need to know to understand this is that it embeds text and images into the same space. ie: the word "dog" is close to images of dogs. Normally this space is a high dimensional real space. Think 512-dimensional or 512 floating point numbers. When you want to measure "closeness" between vectors in this space cosine similarity[2] is a natural choice. Why would you want to quantize values? Well, instead of using a 32-bit float for each dimension, what if you could get away with 1-bit? You would save you 31x the space. Often you'll want to embed millions or billions of pieces of text or images, so the savings represent a huge speed & cost savings and if accuracy isn't impacted too much then it could be worth it. If you naively clip the floats of an existing model, it severely impacts accuracy. However, if you train
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a model from scratch that produces binary outputs, then it appears to perform better. There is one twist. Deep learning models rely on gradient descent to train and binary output doesn't produce useful gradients. We use cosine similarity on floating point vectors and hamming distance on bit vectors. Is there a function that behaves like hamming distance but is nicely differentiable? We can then use this function during training and then vanilla hamming distance during inference. It seems like they've done that. I'd suggest playing around with OpenCLIP[3]. My background is in data science but all my CLIP knowledge comes from doing a side project over the course of a couple weekends. 1. https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/model_doc/clip 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosine_similarity 3. https://github.com/mlfoundations/open_clip
In Binarize CLIP for Multimodal Applications
I have successfully used OpenCLIP models for embedding and similar-image search. The smallest model listed on that UForm page is 79 million parameters, so I presume that you can use other models of similar size. There are a few OpenCLIP models with 80 million or fewer parameters listed here: https://github.com/mlfoundations/open_clip/blob/main/docs/mo... When embeddings are quantized to int8 they still work very well for similarity (no differences in top 10 search on my test set). I haven't tried quantizing the models themselves.
In CatLIP: Clip Vision Accuracy with 2.7x Faster Pre-Training on Web-Scale Data
It is a misconception that Adobe's models have not been trained on copyrighted work. Nobody should be repeating their marketing claims. Adobe has not shown how they train the text encoders in Firefly, or what images were used for the text-based conditioning (i.e. "text to image") part of their image generation model. They are almost certainly using CLIP or T5, which are trained on LAION2b, an image dataset with the very problems they are trying to address, C4 (a text dataset similarly encumbered) and similar. I welcome anyone who works at Adobe to simply answer this question of how they trained the text encoders for text conditioning and put it to rest. There is absolutely nothing sensitive about the issue, unless it exposes them in a lie. So no chance. I think it's a big fat lie. They'd have to have made some other scientific breakthroug
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h, which they didn't. Using information from https://openai.com/research/clip and https://github.com/mlfoundations/open_clip, it's possible to investigate the likelihood that using just their stock image dataset, can they make a working text encoder? It's certainly not impossible, but it's impracticable. On 248m images (roughly the size of Adobe Stock), CLIP gets 37% on ImageNet, and on the 2000m from LAION, it performs 71-80%. And even with 2000m images, CLIP is substantially worse performing than the approach that Imagen uses for "text comprehension," which relies on essentially many billions more images and text tokens.
In Database of artists used to train Midjourney AI garners criticism

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