Instructions to use HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B with libraries, inference providers, notebooks, and local apps. Follow these links to get started.

Libraries

How to use HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B with Transformers:

# Use a pipeline as a high-level helper
from transformers import pipeline

pipe = pipeline("text-generation", model="HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B")
messages = [
    {"role": "user", "content": "Who are you?"},
]
pipe(messages)

# Load model directly
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForCausalLM

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B")
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B")
messages = [
    {"role": "user", "content": "Who are you?"},
]
inputs = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
	messages,
	add_generation_prompt=True,
	tokenize=True,
	return_dict=True,
	return_tensors="pt",
).to(model.device)

outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=40)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0][inputs["input_ids"].shape[-1]:]))

Notebooks
Google Colab
Kaggle
Local Apps Settings

vLLM

How to use HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B with vLLM:

Install from pip and serve model

# Install vLLM from pip:
pip install vllm
# Start the vLLM server:
vllm serve "HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B"
# Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API):
curl -X POST "http://localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions" \
	-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
	--data '{
		"model": "HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B",
		"messages": [
			{
				"role": "user",
				"content": "What is the capital of France?"
			}
		]
	}'

Use Docker

docker model run hf.co/HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B

SGLang

How to use HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B with SGLang:

Install from pip and serve model

# Install SGLang from pip:
pip install sglang
# Start the SGLang server:
python3 -m sglang.launch_server \
    --model-path "HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B" \
    --host 0.0.0.0 \
    --port 30000
# Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API):
curl -X POST "http://localhost:30000/v1/chat/completions" \
	-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
	--data '{
		"model": "HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B",
		"messages": [
			{
				"role": "user",
				"content": "What is the capital of France?"
			}
		]
	}'

Use Docker images

docker run --gpus all \
    --shm-size 32g \
    -p 30000:30000 \
    -v ~/.cache/huggingface:/root/.cache/huggingface \
    --env "HF_TOKEN=<secret>" \
    --ipc=host \
    lmsysorg/sglang:latest \
    python3 -m sglang.launch_server \
        --model-path "HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B" \
        --host 0.0.0.0 \
        --port 30000
# Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API):
curl -X POST "http://localhost:30000/v1/chat/completions" \
	-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
	--data '{
		"model": "HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B",
		"messages": [
			{
				"role": "user",
				"content": "What is the capital of France?"
			}
		]
	}'

Docker Model Runner
How to use HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B with Docker Model Runner:
```
docker model run hf.co/HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B
```

Inference API Issue

#26

by falcongoldman - opened Jul 19, 2025

Discussion

falcongoldman

Jul 19, 2025

import requests
import json

url = "https://router.huggingface.co/v1/chat/completions"

payload = json.dumps({
"messages": [
{
"role": "user",
"content": "How many G in huggingface?"
}
],
"model": "HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B:hf-inference",
"stream": False
})
headers = {
'Authorization': 'Bearer TOKEN',
'Content-Type': 'application/json'
}

response = requests.request("POST", url, headers=headers, data=payload)

print(response.text)

I am getting 404 not found error.

david-thrower

Jul 20, 2025

•

edited Jul 20, 2025

I get a 404 here also. I'm not sure if it is pinging the same REST API, but I presume so. At first I thought I was doing something wrong, but I presume now it is plausible there may be a bigger issue:

from os import getenv
from huggingface_hub import InferenceClient

API_KEY = getenv("HF_TOKEN") 

def ask_llm(prompt):
    client = InferenceClient(
        model="HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B", 
        token=API_KEY,
    )

    completion = client.text_generation(
        prompt=prompt,
        max_new_tokens=500,
        temperature=0.6,
        top_p=0.95,
        repetition_penalty=1.1,     
        top_k=40,
        return_full_text=True
    )

    x = completion.split("</think>")
    if len(x) < 2:
        raise ValueError("LLM API returned a malformed response:")
        print(x)

    return x

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