Unsloth Studio
372 points by brainless 2 days ago | 77 comments

ontouchstart 3 hours ago
I still have trouble to get unsloth studio setup working on my MacBook because of Python tooling issues.

However, since I already have pi working with llama.cpp server from a docker container, I did a quick experiment to compare three code bases:

https://gist.github.com/ontouchstart/7483c12efa3c3d3a49e38c2...

https://gist.github.com/ontouchstart/217fe2b8103a5c0bfaee1e9...

Very interesting.

Will do it again next week if I can get unsloth studio working.

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danielhanchen 3 hours ago
If you can try again we just updated the process sorry! We did a new pypi release:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

uv venv unsloth_studio --python 3.13

source unsloth_studio/bin/activate

uv pip install unsloth==2026.3.7 --torch-backend=auto

unsloth studio setup

unsloth studio -H 0.0.0.0 -p 8888

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ontouchstart 3 hours ago
Thank you Daniel.

Here is the error message on my machine:

https://gist.github.com/ontouchstart/86ca3cbd8b6b61fa0aeec75...

It seems we might need more instructions on how to set up python (via uv) in vanilla MacOS.

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ontouchstart 2 hours ago
I have been updating the gist above and will stop this

``` ../scipy/meson.build:274:9: ERROR: Dependency lookup for OpenBLAS with method 'pkgconfig' failed: Pkg-config for machine host machine not found. Giving up. ```

Too much work.

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zokier 23 hours ago
What is unsloths business/income? They seem to be publishing lot of stuff for free, with no clear product to back them?
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danielhanchen 19 hours ago
Hey! Our primary objective for now is to provide the open source community with cool and useful tooling - we found closed source to be much more popular because of better tooling!

We have much much in the pipeline!!

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brainless 19 hours ago
Thanks! How do you earn or keep yourself afloat? I really like what you guys are doing. And similar orgs. I am personally doing the same, full-time. But I am worried when I will run out of personal savings.
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richardw 10 hours ago
Daniel is a very impressive guy. Well within the realm of “fund the people not the idea” that YC seems to do. Got a few bucks from them and probably earning from collaborations etc. Odds of them not figuring out a business model seem slim.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/unsloth-ai

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sowbug 6 hours ago
From comments elsewhere in this thread, it sounds like Unsloth could also be getting some decent consulting revenue from larger companies.
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reactordev 6 hours ago
The opportunity here is HUUUUGGGEEEE!!!

Companies have no idea what they are doing, they know they need it, they know they want it, engineers want it, they don’t have it in their ecosystem so this is a perfect opportunity to come in with a professional services play. We got you on inference training/running, your models, all that, just focus on your business. Pair that with huggingface’s storage and it’s a win/win.

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zokier 4 hours ago
Investments are not income
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csomar 18 hours ago
You didn't answer the parent question.
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segmondy 9 hours ago
They don't owe anyone an answer.
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zokier 4 hours ago
But if they want to attract users, like they seem to do, then answering would go long way.
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kartaka83838 15 hours ago
that doesnt sound reassuring?
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throwa356262 7 hours ago
With a team size of eight (!) I think they are not exactly bleeding money
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keyle 10 hours ago
I noticed the training part, that was interesting for my use case. Unfortunately it's said 'on NVIDIA'.

Is there an alternative, tutorial, or project you'd recommend that would help me do supervised fine tuning (SFT) with the metal stack / macOS?

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MrDrMcCoy 5 hours ago
They state further down that they're working on non-Nvidia support. Looking forward to it, since I'm pretty heavily invested in suffering on AMD (ROCm sucks, but everything else about AMD is worth it to me.).
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syntaxing 7 hours ago
> Mac: Like CPU - Chat only works for now. MLX training coming very soon
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TiredOfLife 7 hours ago
Use that mac to rent Nvidia gpus
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kahrl 7 hours ago
lol.
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jacquesm 19 hours ago
Unsloth is the real thing. Highly recommended for those running their own AI engines and that want to get the most out of them.
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illusive4080 22 hours ago
Apache license. Can’t wait to try it out at work! LMStudio’s proprietary license makes getting permission hard.
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halJordan 19 hours ago
Some of it is Apache
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smcnally 18 hours ago
Some of unsloth studio’s code is Apache? Or some of lmstudio is?
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mkl 13 hours ago
From the README at https://github.com/unslothai/unsloth: "Unsloth uses a dual-licensing model of Apache 2.0 and AGPL-3.0. The core Unsloth package remains licensed under Apache 2.0, while certain optional components, such as the Unsloth Studio UI are licensed under AGPL-3.0."
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illusive4080 10 hours ago
Good to know. AGPL is fine at my workplace too, whereas the custom LMStudio license has been in review since mid January with no ETA in sight.
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solomatov 7 hours ago
What do you mean by custom LMStudio license? Your employer requires reviews of proprietary EULAs or do you try to get a custom licensing deal from LMStudio?
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kuon 12 hours ago
I hope you will support AMD. This looks Nice but I went the complicated route with AMD GPUs.
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MrDrMcCoy 5 hours ago
They state that they're working on it. I'm waiting, too.
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car 23 hours ago
Tried to build from source on MacOS, but got this error:

  (base)   unsloth git:(main) unsloth studio setup
  ╔══════════════════════════════════════╗
  ║     Unsloth Studio Setup Script      ║
  ╚══════════════════════════════════════╝ 
   Node v25.8.1 and npm 11.11.0 already meet requirements. Skipping nvm install.
   Node v25.8.1 | npm 11.11.0
   npm run build failed (exit code 2):

  > unsloth-theme@0.0.0 build
  > tsc -b && vite build

  src/features/chat/shared-composer.tsx(366,17): error TS6133: 'status' is declared but its value is never read.
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danielhanchen 3 hours ago
Apologies on the delay - we fixed it! Please re-try with:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

uv venv unsloth_studio --python 3.13

source unsloth_studio/bin/activate

uv pip install unsloth --torch-backend=auto

unsloth studio setup

unsloth studio -H 0.0.0.0 -p 8888

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danielhanchen 23 hours ago
Hey will check ASAP and fix - sorry about that
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trvz 24 hours ago
Installing with pip on macOS is just not an acceptable option. It'll mess up your system just like npm or gem.

This needs to go on homebrew or be a zip file with an app for manual download.

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DIVx0 24 hours ago
Agree with you, a slightly more maintainable way to use it now is with "uv" or mise. i've used `uv tool install unsloth` for this one.
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danielhanchen 23 hours ago
Yep - uv is a better fit - and you get parallel downloads as well
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saagarjha 11 hours ago
It's not just uv, it also will drop an nvm install in your home directory :(
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danielhanchen 23 hours ago
Hey we're still working on making installation much better - appreciate the feedback!

We come from Python land mainly so packaging and distribution is all very new to us - homebrew will definitely be next!

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bityard 23 hours ago
I recommend installing uv first, then you can install any Python code you want inside a virtual environment to keep it isolated from the rest of the system.
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danielhanchen 23 hours ago
Yep uv pip install unsloth works as well - we probably should have just made that the default - in fact Unsloth makes its own venv using UV if you have it dynamically
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mmis1000 18 hours ago
I think the website should probably mention those installation preset in unsloth pyproject.toml though. The website instruct you to install dependencies separately. But it turns out there are dedicated preset that install specific rocm/cuda/xpu version in the project.
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anentropic 12 hours ago
or `uv tool install unsloth` for a safe 'global' installation
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mmis1000 19 hours ago
Uv helps you up though. Use a pyproject.toml and uv sync. Everything will be put into the venv only, nothing spread across the whole system.

The pyproject.toml can even handles build env for you, so you no longer need a setup.sh that installs 10 tool in specific order with specific flag to produce working environment. A single uv sync, and the job is done.

Plus the result is reproducible, so if this time uv sync work, then it also work next time.

Highly recommend if you are still on pip.

Note: Take a example that I used to install unsloth with rocm setup that based on unreleased git version dependencies and graphic card specific build flag, all of them can be handled with one command 'uv sync'. This will require a big pile of shell script if doing another way. https://github.com/unslothai/unsloth/issues/4280#issuecommen...

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jszymborski 21 hours ago
Would pipx solve the problem?

https://pipx.pypa.io/stable/installation/

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gessha 23 hours ago
I know the whole package system across most languages is a dumpster fire but for Python, uv solves a lot of problems.

uv init

uv add unsloth

uv run main.py % or whatever

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danielhanchen 23 hours ago
Yep UV is fantastic - should have just that default!
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smcleod 15 hours ago
Ah yes, came to say something similar, Python dependencies are an absolute nightmare, even with uv it feels like there's always a battle to make other peoples Python apps install.

Update: It looks like it doesn't work with the current Python version, you might have to downgrade to Python 3.13 (however even then I still get `error: unexpected argument '--torch-backend' found`)

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Computer0 23 hours ago
On my linux systems I use venv to not affect system packages, is that not an option for this situation?
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beernet 23 hours ago
Agreed, feels like a vibe-coded frontend based on already given backend features.

Also, never saw any Unsloth related software in production to this day. Feels strongly like a non-essential tool for hobby LLM wizards.

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danielhanchen 23 hours ago
You would be surprised - we're the 4th largest independent distributor of LLMs in the world - and nearly every Fortune 500 company has utilized either our RL fine-tuning package or used our quants and models - we for example collab directly with large labs to release models with bug fixes.
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airspresso 23 hours ago
Unsloth is providing the best and most reliable libraries for finetuning LLMs. We've used it for production use-cases where I work, definitely solid.
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danielhanchen 19 hours ago
Glad it was helpful!
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ta9000 20 hours ago
Even a brief reading of their site would have spared you this embarrassment.
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claaams 17 hours ago
Will check back when there's AMD support.
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fl0id 11 hours ago
Does it use gpu support on mac? At least when running setup, it said cpu only.
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meowokIknewit 2 days ago
The GUI for the fine tuning looks interesting. Hopefully this leads to a lot of new custom models
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danielhanchen 23 hours ago
Thank you! We're still iterating on it so any suggestions are welcome!
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yomansat 21 hours ago
FYI, if any devs are around, the privacy policy still links to the gitbook.
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danielhanchen 19 hours ago
Oh will check and fix - thanks
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Havoc 7 hours ago
Congrats to team. Busy build a dataset for training so will def test it out
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jawerty 2 days ago
Excited to use this been using unsloth models for the past couple years
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danielhanchen 23 hours ago
Thank you for your continued support - we have much more planned for it!
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peddling-brink 18 hours ago
This looks really cool. Any chance you'll support pretraining runs as well?
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ma2kx 18 hours ago
Nice! Is there something planned to run the finetuning via hf jobs or runpod?
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yacin 18 hours ago
wish there were an option to disable the annoying startup messages with emojis when using the library.
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car 23 hours ago
Can Unsloth Studio use already downloaded models?
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nodja 21 hours ago
IDK how it did but it detected my LM studio downloaded models I have on a spinning drive (they're not in the default location).
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saberience 24 hours ago
Who's the intended user for this?

Is it like, for AI hobbyists? I.e. I have a 4090 at home and want to fine-tune models?

Is it a competitor to LMStudio?

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danielhanchen 23 hours ago
You would be surprised! Nearly every Fortune 500 company has utilized either our RL fine-tuning package or used our quants and models - the UI was primarily a culmination of pain points folks had when doing either training or inference!

We're complimentary to LM Studio - they have a great tool as well!

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TheTaytay 21 hours ago
I don’t know why this is being downvoted. Danielhanchen is legit, and unsloth was early to the fine-tuning on a budget party.
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danielhanchen 19 hours ago
Haha no worries at all :)
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lastdong 24 hours ago
From the homepage looks like it: “Training: Works on NVIDIA GPUs: RTX 30, 40, 50, Blackwell, DGX Spark/Station etc.”
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huydotnet 23 hours ago
you just answered your own question, "AI hobbyists who has 4090 at home". And they are pretty much targeted user of Unsloth since the start.
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danielhanchen 23 hours ago
Actually the opposite haha- more than 50% of our audience comes from large organizations eg Meta, NASA, the UN, Walmart, Spotify, AWS, Google, and the list goes on!
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mlnj 24 hours ago
I am unaware lm studio is being used for fine tuning. I believe it only does inference.

Happy to see unsloth making it even easier for people like me to get going with fine tuning. Not that I am unable to I'm just lazy.

Fine tuning with a UI is definitely targeted towards hobbyists. Sadly I'll have to wait for AMD ROCm support.

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danielhanchen 23 hours ago
Thanks! We do have normal AMD support for Unsloth but yes the UI doesn't support it just yet! Will keep you posted!
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MrDrMcCoy 5 hours ago
What does "normal AMD support" mean here? I was completely unable to get it working on my Ryzen AI 9700 XT. I had to munge the versions in the requirements to get libraries compatible with recent enough ROCm, and it didn't go well at all. My last attempt was a couple weeks before studio was announced.
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maxothex 5 hours ago
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smissingham 18 hours ago
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cboyardee 16 hours ago
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