Hacker News Reader

SAM uses a CLIP-H as an image encoder, a very large encoder that obviously does not fit in 8 MB.

Also read the "Efficient & flexible model design" section on the page.

Also in the FAQ: "How big is the model?

The image encoder has 632M parameters. The prompt encoder and mask decoder have 4M parameters."

I cannot edit the comment anymore but I should have written MAE ViT-H and not CLIP-H (same size but CLIP models are trained in a different way).

Is MAE ViT-H available freely? My system could certainly handle it locally if it can be obtained and dropped in.

Yup

MAE ViT-H is available freely, in fact the entirety of the SAM pipeline is open source, and they even released the dataset.

I didn't say otherwise.