Tahoe+ only
Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
81–90 of 180 posts
Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
#82This is similar to something I was playing around with last month-- basically just a CLI for accessing the foundational models.
https://github.com/ehamiter/afm
It's really handy for quick things like "what's the capital of country x" but for coding, I feel that it is severely limited. With such a small context it's (currently) not great for complicated things.
Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
#83How much storage does it take up?
4mb download, after install about 15mb, model is already on your mac with mac os x tahoe
Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
#84Local AIs are the future in times of limited resources. This could be the beginning of something big. I like that Apple opens up like this. Hopefully more to come.
completely agree.
Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
#85I like the approach of running everything locally. I'm strongly of the opinion that the privacy angle for local models is going to keep getting stronger and more relevant. The amount of articles that come out about accidents happening because of people handing too much context to cloud models the more self reinforcing this will become.
The other thing, is encrypted inferencing a thing/service currently? I want to run my own models locally just because if I'm going to be chatting to it about my day to day life why send it to a server in plaintext.
Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
#86I hacked this together last fall to let you use Apple Foundation Models with llm: https://github.com/btucker/llm-apple . To enable that I built python bindings with Claude Code: https://github.com/btucker/apple-foundation-models-py Unfortunately, I found the small context window makes the utility pretty limited.
Yeah I think you hit on the head a good way to use it though. I'm not on MacOS but KDE has a little tool called krunner[1] that lets you perform simple tasks from a small pop-up on your desktop. It would be cool if I could do slightly agentic things from there with a local model like ask what the capital of Austria is, or what's the current exchange rate between two currencies.
Then save the heavy lifting for the big boys.
Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
#87I like the approach of running everything locally. I'm strongly of the opinion that the privacy angle for local models is going to keep getting stronger and more relevant. The amount of articles that come out about accidents happening because of people handing too much context to cloud models the more self reinforcing this will become.
The other thing, is encrypted inferencing a thing/service currently? I want to run my own models locally just because if I'm going to be chatting to it about my day to day life why send it to a server in plaintext.
encrypted inferencing, meaning homomorphic encryption: no, it's not solved.
cryptographic confirmation of zero knowledge: yes.
the latter, based on trust in the hardware manufacturer and their root ca. so, encrypted if you trust intel/nvidia to sign it.
there are a few services, phala, tinfoil, near ai, redpill is an aggregator of those
Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
#88I like the approach of running everything locally. I'm strongly of the opinion that the privacy angle for local models is going to keep getting stronger and more relevant. The amount of articles that come out about accidents happening because of people handing too much context to cloud models the more self reinforcing this will become.
It's only half of the solution though. If the models are trained in a closed way, they can prioritize values encoded during training even if that's not what you want (example: ask the open Chinese models about Tiananmen). It's not beyond imagining that these models would e.g. try to send your data to authorities or advertisers when their training says so, even if you run them locally.
So the full solution would be models trained in an open verifiable way and running locally.
Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
#89I like the approach of running everything locally. I'm strongly of the opinion that the privacy angle for local models is going to keep getting stronger and more relevant. The amount of articles that come out about accidents happening because of people handing too much context to cloud models the more self reinforcing this will become.
local is best for privacy, but i personally think you don't need to go local. anthropic, google, openai etc, decided that their consumer ai plans would not be private. partly to collect training data, the other half to employ moderators to review user activity for safety. we trust that human moderators will not review and flag our icloud docs, onedrive or gmail, or aggregate such documents into training data for llms…
do you have any provider recommendations? I've experimented with this on runpod serverless, but I've been meaning to dig deeper before I feel comfortable with personal data.
I saw a service named Phala, which claims to be actually no-knowledge to server side (I think). It was significantly more expensive, but interesting to see it's out there. My thought was escaping the data-collection-hungry consumer models was a big win.
Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Apple Silicon Mac, macOS 26 Tahoe or newer, Apple Intelligence enabled
Yes, the model ships with Tahoe, not previous versions. I too would love to try this for simple prompts but won’t be updating past Sequoia for the foreseeable future.
Same. What a disaster Tahoe is.