/Tech2h ago

Meta AI's Lucas Beyer shares an inside anecdote about the grueling year-long struggle to release the SigLIP model

Story Overview

Meta AI researcher Lucas Beyer recounts how he once doubted SigLIP would ever escape Google's internal review, crediting colleague Xiaohua Zhai with six to twelve months of steady advocacy that finally cleared the path for the vision-language model's public release.

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Original post

Lucas Beyer (bl16)@giffmana#72inTech

@xeophon Fun fact: i did not believe we would ever be allowed to release SigLIP. It's all @XiaohuaZhai who believed in that and persevered, took him somewhere between half a year to a year.

Florian Brand@xeophon

@giffmana Really hope that you are allowed to publish tech reports and/or small artifacts. The MAI tech report is a great example; and SigLip is still one of the greatest artifacts ever released in terms of impact (and releasing this didn’t hurt G in the slightest!)

2:50 AM · Jun 21, 2026 · 470 Views

Developer Impact

SigLIP's Quiet Backbone Role in Open VLMs

Checkpoints and code from the original release remain freely available and have been picked up as encoders in several downstream open vision-language projects, though the exact breadth of that influence stays tied to citation counts rather than usage dashboards.

Open Question

The Approval Black Box Still Unopened

Beyond Beyer's anecdote, no further public record has surfaced on who inside Google weighed in or what specific concerns delayed the green light, leaving the mechanics of that year-long wait opaque.

Sentiment

Users praise SigLIP's foundational role in sustaining the open VLM ecosystem and thank the researchers for securing its release.

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100.0%

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1 comments with sentiment.

Cluster Engagement

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Florian Brand@xeophon

@giffmana @XiaohuaZhai Was very very much worth it, the open VLM ecosystem is basically held up by SigLIP :D Thanks so much!!

Lucas Beyer (bl16)@giffmana

@xeophon Fun fact: i did not believe we would ever be allowed to release SigLIP. It's all @XiaohuaZhai who believed in that and persevered, took him somewhere between half a year to a year.

2h11550

Qianyi Zhang@QianyiZhan95891

@giffmana @xeophon @XiaohuaZhai now in restrospective, does the opensource accelerate your research now?

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