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Apple Foundation Models

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71–80 of 244 posts

Re: Apple Foundation Models

#72

This is Apple commoditizing LLMs while keeping control of the UX. They are a hardware company and will keep selling the best machine for AI use. Well done.

Benedict Evans may be right after all; frontier models look more and more like telecom companies in the 90s. Billions and billions of investment in infrastructure while others further up the stack captured all the value.

Re: Apple Foundation Models

#75

While I'm happy with Apple introducing this abstraction. my main concern was with local models. I'd love using Gemma4 as an example. but thinking of a user. if 10 Apps each uses same model and downloads it, the phone will be bloated. I still didn't understand if Apple provided a way for multiple apps uses same on-device model (without tricky namespaces and permissions). I didn't see anything suggesting that's the cas…

Check out “Bring an LLM provider to the Foundation Models framework” - https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/339

I see an id based ability suggesting `modelId`. but in current docs I cannot find any context to it. The other limit is that it suggests Swift Packages. but I'm not seeing any model management hints similar to Docker/Ollama/etc where:

- Application can ask for specific model, if available use it. if not, ask to download it (or try some fallback / alternative)

- User can manage models. So as a user I can clean unused models (and for non-techie have something similar to offloading apps when unused for some period of time).

Re: Apple Foundation Models

#76
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is about (from the eyes of a user) white-labeled usage of Claude models on Apple devices, this subthread is about white-labeled usage of LLMs on Apple devices, how is it not relevant?

Because that's not what the article is about; this is about a unified API for the _app developers_ to access different kind of models. That API has no user-facing components, and has no influence over UX of what the end-users are interacting with. The users won't know if you used Foundation Models API or integrated with OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini SDK directly.

> The users won't know if you used Foundation Models API or integrated with OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini SDK directly.

That's the point! That's the whole "white-labeling" part, and what the commentator earlier is talking about. You're very close in understanding the context here!

Re: Apple Foundation Models

#77

This is Apple commoditizing LLMs while keeping control of the UX. They are a hardware company and will keep selling the best machine for AI use. Well done.

Does “the best machine for AI use” apply here considering these models are still server-side?

Re: Apple Foundation Models

#78
I didn’t understand what they were doing with Apple Foundation Models until this. It made it sound like they were training their own. Good strat tho!

Re: Apple Foundation Models

#79
post #72

This is Apple commoditizing LLMs while keeping control of the UX. They are a hardware company and will keep selling the best machine for AI use. Well done.

Benedict Evans may be right after all; frontier models look more and more like telecom companies in the 90s. Billions and billions of investment in infrastructure while others further up the stack captured all the value.

In spite of their deeper pockets, massive datacenters, colosal amounts of user data, and hundreds of thousands of top developers, even Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google are well behind.

I think Evans is completely wrong. There are only 2 truly frontier models. (at least for now). And Anthropic seems to be leaving OpenAI behind so there might be only 1 in the near future. (which is scary/dangerous)

Re: Apple Foundation Models

#80

I think this is just Apple planning for their on-device models getting better, which makes sense given they have access to Gemini now. If developers use this for all their code calling an external LLM, then as Apple's model becomes more capable and covers more use cases it'll be easy to switch to it at individual call sites. That'll give apps better UX and save developers money on a bill that Apple doesn't get a cut…

How does using Gemini lead to better on-device models?
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