Jun Kim, creator of oMLX, joins Hugging Face to lead MLX ecosystem development

Hugging Face announced that Jun Kim, the creator and maintainer of oMLX, has joined the company to support the MLX community. Kim will continue leading oMLX, which remains an Apache 2.0-licensed project.

Hugging Face described MLX as Apple's framework for local AI, optimized for Apple Silicon, and positioned itself as a central hub for MLX models. The company has been a long-time supporter of MLX since its introduction in late 2023.

The transition of oMLX from a side project to a fully maintained and funded initiative under Hugging Face is expected to improve stability and accelerate development. This change aims to better support contributors and enable long-term planning for the project.

Hugging Face outlined its goal to unblock the community's ability to run local AI across various forms, with oMLX serving as a testbed for new ideas. The company plans to collaborate with existing projects like mlx-lm, mlx-vlm, and LMStudio to strengthen the MLX ecosystem.

A key focus area is simplifying the transition of transformer model definitions to MLX-compatible implementations. Hugging Face aims to streamline this process so different engines can focus on their unique features while leveraging shared foundational work.