AIKit ✨

AIKit is a comprehensive platform to quickly get started to host, deploy, build and fine-tune large language models (LLMs).

AIKit offers three main capabilities:

• Inference: AIKit uses LocalAI, which supports a wide range of inference capabilities and formats. LocalAI provides a drop-in replacement REST API that is OpenAI API compatible, so you can use any OpenAI API compatible client, such as Kubectl AI, Chatbot-UI and many more, to send requests to open LLMs!

• Fine-Tuning: AIKit offers an extensible fine-tuning interface. It supports Unsloth for fast, memory efficient, and easy fine-tuning experience.

• OCI Packaging: Package models as OCI artifacts for distribution through any OCI-compliant registry. Supports CNCF ModelPack specification and generic artifact packaging.

👉 For full documentation, please see AIKit website!

Features

• 🐳 No GPU, Internet access or additional tools needed except for Docker or Podman!
• 🤏 Minimal image size, resulting in less vulnerabilities and smaller attack surface with a custom chiseled image
• 🎵 Fine-tune support
• 📦 OCI packaging support for distributing models as OCI artifacts
• 🚀 Easy to use declarative configuration for inference and fine-tuning
• ✨ OpenAI API compatible to use with any OpenAI API compatible client
• 📸 Multi-modal model support
• 🖼️ Image generation support
• 🦙 Support for GGUF (llama) and GGML (llama-ggml) models
• 🚢 Kubernetes deployment ready
• 📚 Supports multiple models with a single image
• 🖥️ Supports AMD64 and ARM64 CPUs and GPU-accelerated inferencing with NVIDIA CUDA and AMD ROCm support
• 🔐 Ensure supply chain security with SBOMs, Provenance attestations, and signed images
• 🌈 Supports air-gapped inference with self-hosted or local registries when model content and dependencies are baked or mirrored ahead of time; runner images that download models at startup are not air-gapped by default.

Quick Start

You can get started with AIKit quickly on your local machine without a GPU!

docker run -d --rm -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/kaito-project/aikit/qwen3.5:4b

After running this, navigate to http://localhost:8080/chat to access the WebUI!

API

AIKit provides an OpenAI API compatible endpoint, so you can use any OpenAI API compatible client to send requests to open LLMs!

curl http://localhost:8080/v1/chat/completions -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{
    "model": "qwen-3.5-4b",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "explain kubernetes in a sentence"}]
  }'

Output should be similar to:

{
  // ...
    "model": "qwen-3.5-4b",
    "choices": [
        {
            "index": 0,
            "finish_reason": "stop",
            "message": {
                "role": "assistant",
                "content": "Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of applications and services, allowing developers to focus on writing code rather than managing infrastructure."
            }
        }
    ],
  // ...
}

That's it! 🎉 API is OpenAI compatible so this is a drop-in replacement for any OpenAI API compatible client.

Pre-made Models

AIKit comes with pre-made models that you can use out-of-the-box!

If it doesn't include a specific model, you can always create your own images, and host in a container registry of your choice!

CPU

[!NOTE] AIKit supports both AMD64 and ARM64 CPUs. You can run the same command on either architecture, and Docker will automatically pull the correct image for your CPU.

Depending on your CPU capabilities, AIKit will automatically select the most optimized instruction set.

NVIDIA CUDA

[!NOTE] To enable NVIDIA GPU acceleration, please see GPU Acceleration.

Published pre-made GPU images include NVIDIA CUDA libraries. For models also listed in the CPU section, the NVIDIA CUDA commands below add the --gpus all flag.

AMD ROCm (experimental)

[!NOTE] AMD GPU acceleration is currently available for custom llama-cpp images built with runtime: rocm. Published pre-made model images are currently CUDA-based, so for AMD GPUs please create your own image and follow the ROCm instructions in GPU Acceleration.

ROCm support currently applies to the llama-cpp backend on linux/amd64.

Apple Silicon (experimental)

[!NOTE] To enable GPU acceleration on Apple Silicon, please see Podman Desktop documentation. For more information, please see GPU Acceleration.

Apple Silicon is an experimental runtime and it may change in the future. This runtime is specific to Apple Silicon only, and it will not work as expected on other architectures, including Intel Macs.

Only gguf models are supported on Apple Silicon.

Contributing

Want to contribute to AIKit? Check out our Contributing Guide for development setup, testing instructions, and contribution guidelines.

What's next?

👉 For more information and how to fine tune models or create your own images, please see AIKit website!