Jun Kim, oMLX creator and maintainer, joins Hugging Face to support the MLX community

Hugging Face Hires oMLX Creator to Bolster Local AI on Apple Silicon

Hugging Face has officially hired Jun Kim, the creator and maintainer of the popular oMLX project, in a move that signals a significant investment in the local AI ecosystem for Apple Silicon. The announcement, published September 22, 2026, confirms Kim will continue his work on oMLX with the full backing of Hugging Face. This development is critical as the demand for efficient, on-device AI accelerates, positioning Apple's MLX framework as a key platform for developers and researchers working outside of the typical GPU-dominated cloud environment.

From Side Project to Fully Funded Initiative

The acquisition transitions oMLX from a personal side project into a fully funded and maintained initiative, a change expected to bring greater stability and faster development. Hugging Face emphasized that the core structure of the project will remain intact, ensuring continuity for the existing community of contributors and users. The goal is to leverage oMLX as a testbed for new ideas while strengthening the foundational libraries it depends on.

• Project Status: Becomes a fully maintained and funded project.
• Leadership: Jun Kim will continue to lead oMLX.
• Licensing: The project remains under the open-source Apache 2.0 license.
• Collaboration: Hugging Face intends to upstream relevant work to other core libraries like mlx-lm and mlx-vlm.

A Streamlined Path for Transformers on MLX

The broader impact of this hire is aimed at unblocking the community by creating a more efficient pipeline from model definition to on-device execution. A primary focus will be to streamline the process of converting models from the widely adopted transformers library into reference MLX implementations. This allows various inference engines, such as LMStudio, to consume these models more easily and focus on their unique features rather than on complex conversion processes. The move solidifies Hugging Face's role as a central infrastructure provider for the entire local AI stack, from model hosting to framework development.

Hugging Face's hiring of Jun Kim is a strategic acquisition of talent and community leadership, aimed at ensuring its ecosystem becomes the default, indispensable layer for deploying transformer models on Apple's growing hardware platform.