How to Deploy CogVLM

CogVLM, an open-source Large Multimodal Model (LMM), is designed to handle tasks involving both text and images, such as visual question answering, document OCR, and zero-shot object detection. Despite its strong performance in qualitative testing, the model is now reaching its end-of-life status due to dependency conflicts and security vulnerabilities, with future support being directed towards fully-supported models like Qwen2.5-VL. Users can still deploy CogVLM on their hardware using Roboflow Inference, an open-source inference server, which supports various quantization levels to optimize the model's RAM usage. The guide illustrates deploying CogVLM on a GCP Compute Engine instance with an NVIDIA T4 GPU using 4-bit quantization, showcasing its capabilities by accurately answering questions about a forklift image, though its performance varies based on the image quality and prompt.