brainlessUnsloth Studio
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.
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.
Yep - uv is a better fit - and you get parallel downloads as well
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.
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
or `uv tool install unsloth` for a safe 'global' installation
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!
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...
What is unsloths business/income? They seem to be publishing lot of stuff for free, with no clear product to back them?
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!!
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.
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.
Unsloth AI: Open-Source Reinforcement Learning (RL) & Fine-tuning for LLMs. | Y Combinator
Open-Source Reinforcement Learning (RL) & Fine-tuning for LLMs. Founded in 2023 by Daniel Han and Michael Han, Unsloth AI has 8 employees based in San Francisco, CA, USA. Unsloth AI is hiring for 1 roles in engineering.
From comments elsewhere in this thread, it sounds like Unsloth could also be getting some decent consulting revenue from larger companies.
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.
I've been wondering this since they started it, mostly as a concern they stay afloat. Since Daniel does the work of ten, it seems like their value:cost ratio is world-class at the very least.
With the studio release, it seems to like they could be on the path to just bootstrapping a unicorn or a 10x corn or whatever that's called, which is super interesting. Anyway, his refusal to go into details reassures me, sounds like things are fine, and they're shipping. Vai com dios
that doesnt sound reassuring?
With a team size of eight (!) I think they are not exactly bleeding money
Apache license. Can’t wait to try it out at work! LMStudio’s proprietary license makes getting permission hard.
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."
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.
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?
Employer must review all EULA terms, yes. The license is a hand crafted proprietary license not a standard OS license.
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?
Use that mac to rent Nvidia gpus
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.
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
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.
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.
Daniel, it works now. Thanks for the hard work!
https://gist.github.com/ontouchstart/532312fcba59aec3ce7f6aa...
