The interesting part is not whether Apple wins the biggest model race, but whether it changes the economics: If enough AI runs locally, every token avoided is cloud capacity nobody has to build. That is a very different business model from selling ever more cloud compute.
I’m pretty skeptical local models can hold a candle to the cloud-based ones, particularly the ones Apple trains.
Raw capability is only one metric: A local model probably will not beat the best cloud model any time soon, but it does not need to. If it handles 80 to 90% of everyday tasks instantly, privately and at near zero marginal cost, that is a huge win. Reserve the cloud for the genuinely hard requests, not every prompt.
also this is just the beginning. give it 5-10 years and it may be more like 99%.
Do you use cloud or local ai to write your comments?
Most people don’t need deep agentic ai on their phones, they just need quick answers to questions, to add events to their calendars, answer emails, and remember things about their lives. These local llms actually perform better than the cloud ones for these tasks
I’m a big fan of local AI and I think it has to be the future.
It’s ridiculous l, like Bonsia AI’s Q1 models are like 3.5GB easily doing basic tasks that most people are asking 600GB flagship models.
Who on earth would pay for something that needs a basically terabyte or RAM that only performs 10% better
The industry keeps benchmarking against other labs instead of against user needs: If a 3.5GB model answers 95% of everyday questions well enough, the remaining few percent has to justify hundreds of gigabytes of weights, huge energy bills and constant cloud costs.
It seems to have been a plan for a long time, given their huge shift to unified memory architectures across most of their hardware.
They’re pretty much the only vendor where you can cost-effectively deploy a foundational LLM locally.
It would seem so. On the other hand, it is puzzling that they did not also allocate the necessary resources to the development of LLMs. 🤷
Looks like an interesting approach
Absolutely. Looking forward to seeing the next generation of Macs.
I couldn’t give a shit less about apple but man I’m I hoping this comes to fruition.
I’d like to buy hardware again.
Tim Cook for all his faults is always been great at politics and this is an extension of that.
Cook’s biggest product might be expectation management. He rarely promises tomorrow’s miracle, which buys Apple room to ship when it suits them instead of when Wall Street gets impatient.
And this will have huge ramifications for my field, energy, because a substantial portion of compute power usage will move out of data centers and into the edge (your iPhone)
The decentralised operation of LLMs would also be significantly simpler and cheaper for the use of decentralised renewable energy sources.
At least gpus will finally cease their breakneck price climb, I say, for the 800th time over the last two decades.
Apple’s AI strategy is leaving them behind
Apple’s stock drops on failure to meet AI promises
Etc.
Now whose stock is dropping?
Stock prices aren’t proof of being right, but they do show investors can change their minds a lot faster than the narratives do.
I am practicing that strategy now. I recently upgraded to an iPad Pro M5 (the day price increases were announced, jumped on a deal immediately), upgraded several shortcuts with Apple Intelligence, and am refining them to run entirely on-device instead of in PCC (not using ChatGPT at all).
I’m waiting for the next generation of Mac Mini and Mac Studio.
