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.
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.
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
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
Yeah, basically an enhanced Siri.