FAQ

What Kjarni is not

• Not a training framework. It runs inference only.
• Not a general model runtime. It runs the architecture families listed under Models, implemented natively. For an arbitrary research model, ONNX Runtime or PyTorch is the right tool.
• Not a server. It is a library in your process. Nothing listens on a port.
• Not on mobile yet. No Android or iOS builds.

FAQ

Does Kjarni need Python?

No. The engine is a native library, so a C#, Go, C++, Rust or command line program needs no Python installed. Kjarni also publishes Python bindings on PyPI for use from Python.

Does Kjarni need a GPU or CUDA?

No. Everything runs on CPU by default. GPU support is optional and goes through WebGPU, using Vulkan, DirectX 12 or Metal, so no CUDA toolkit is involved.

Does it work offline?

Yes, after a model is downloaded once. Models can also be shipped with an application and loaded from a local folder so the network is never used.

Can I run a local LLM with Kjarni from C#?

Yes. The Chat class in the Kjarni package runs Qwen, Llama, Phi, Mistral and DeepSeek R1 models in-process with streaming, and Kjarni.Extensions.AI exposes it as an IChatClient. Tool calling is not supported yet.

Can I do semantic search without a vector database?

Yes. Kjarni's indexer builds a keyword (BM25) and vector index on disk, and the searcher queries it in keyword, semantic or hybrid mode, with optional cross-encoder reranking. This is available from Rust, C#, Python, Go, C/C++ and the command line.

Does Kjarni produce the same embeddings as sentence-transformers?

Yes, for the models in the registry: same weights, same pooling, same truncation length. The C# and C++ posts on this site show the numbers side by side. Chat, summarization and translation produce the same text as transformers given the same weights and decoding settings.

Which languages can transcribe audio?

All of them except the browser: Rust, C#, Python, Go, C/C++ and the command line (kjarni transcribe), with the Transcriber class in each binding.

Does Kjarni run in the browser?

Yes. The kjarni-wasm npm package runs embeddings, classification, reranking, search and chat in a Web Worker, on CPU with WebAssembly SIMD. The live demo runs three models in the page.

What license is Kjarni under?

MIT or Apache 2.0, at your option.