Running Janus Pro 1B Locally on Your Mac

Photo by Matt Seymour on Unsplash

Janus Pro, released in January 2025, is an advanced open-source multimodal AI model developed by DeepSeek, designed to unify image generation and multimodal understanding within a single framework.

Why it’s different than other models out there?

• Multimodal Capabilities: Process both text and images for tasks like captioning, image synthesis, and cross-modal reasoning.
• Efficiency & Accessibility: With variants such as the lightweight 1B model, Janus Pro is optimized for running locally — even on consumer hardware like your Mac.

For more technical details, check out the official model page on Hugging Face and the research paper on arXiv.

Getting Started

1. Set Up Your Environment

This setup is tested in the following environment:

• M2 Pro 16GB (I use macOS Sequoia)
• Node.js
• Git with LFS support.

2. Init The Project

Initialize a Node.js project and clone the Janus Pro 1B ONNX version from this HuggingFace repository.

mkdir janus-pro-1b-start
cd janus-pro-1b-start
mkdir model/resolve
cd model/resolve
git clone…