oMLX Creator Jun Kim Joins Hugging Face to Support the MLX Community

Summary

Hugging Face announced that Jun Kim, the creator and maintainer of oMLX, has joined the company to support the MLX community. The company said it is investing in local AI and views MLX, Apple’s framework for local AI optimized for Apple Silicon, as a central part of that ecosystem. oMLX will remain an Apache 2.0 project, with Kim continuing to lead it. Hugging Face expects the move to give oMLX more stability, funding, and capacity for faster long-term development, while enabling Kim to guide contributors more effectively. The company also plans to use oMLX as a testbed for new ideas and build on related projects such as mlx-lm and mlx-vlm. Hugging Face said it wants to upstream useful work when appropriate and continue collaborating with MLX projects and LM Studio. One stated focus is shortening the path from a Transformers model definition to a reference MLX implementation that can be used by different inference engines. The goal is to make new Transformers models run on MLX more easily while allowing each engine to focus on its own features. The announcement positions oMLX as part of Hugging Face’s broader effort to provide tools and building blocks for running open, local AI.