[HN Gopher] iPhone 17 Pro Demonstrated Running a 400B LLM
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       iPhone 17 Pro Demonstrated Running a 400B LLM
        
       https://xcancel.com/anemll/status/2035901335984611412
        
       Author : anemll
       Score  : 428 points
       Date   : 2026-03-23 14:30 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (twitter.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
        
       | ashwinnair99 wrote:
       | A year ago this would have been considered impossible. The
       | hardware is moving faster than anyone's software assumptions.
        
         | cogman10 wrote:
         | This isn't a hardware feat, this is a software triumph.
         | 
         | They didn't make special purpose hardware to run a model. They
         | crafted a large model so that it could run on consumer hardware
         | (a phone).
        
           | pdpi wrote:
           | It's both.
           | 
           | We haven't had phones running laptop-grade CPUs/GPUs for that
           | long, and that is a very real hardware feat. Likewise, nobody
           | would've said running a 400b LLM on a low-end laptop was
           | feasible, and that is very much a software triumph.
        
             | bigyabai wrote:
             | > We haven't had phones running laptop-grade CPUs/GPUs for
             | that long
             | 
             | Agree to disagree, we've had laptop-grade smartphone
             | hardware for longer than we've had LLMs.
        
               | pdpi wrote:
               | Kind of.
               | 
               | We've had solid CPUs for a while, but GPUs have lagged
               | behind (and they're the ones that matter for this
               | particular application). iPhones still lead by a
               | comfortable margin on this front, but have historically
               | been pretty limited on the IO front (only supported USB2
               | speeds until recently).
        
           | smallerize wrote:
           | The iPhone 17 Pro launched 8 months ago with 50% more RAM and
           | about double the inference performance of the previous iPhone
           | Pro (also 10x prompt processing speed).
        
           | SV_BubbleTime wrote:
           | >triumph
           | 
           | It's been a lot of years, but all I can hear after reading
           | that is ... _I'm making a note here, huge success_
        
             | breggles wrote:
             | _It 's hard to overstate my satisfaction!_
        
             | GorbachevyChase wrote:
             | There's no use crying over every mistake. You just keep on
             | trying until you run out of cake.
        
           | anemll wrote:
           | both, tbh
        
         | mannyv wrote:
         | The software has real software engineers working on it instead
         | of researchers.
         | 
         | Remember when people were arguing about whether to use mmap?
         | What a ridiculous argument.
         | 
         | At some point someone will figure out how to tile the weights
         | and the memory requirements will drop again.
        
           | snovv_crash wrote:
           | The real improvement will be when the software engineers get
           | into the training loop. Then we can have MoE that use cache-
           | friendly expert utilisation and maybe even learned
           | prefetching for what the next experts will be.
        
             | zozbot234 wrote:
             | > maybe even learned prefetching for what the next experts
             | will be
             | 
             | Experts are predicted by layer and the individual layer
             | reads are quite small, so this is not really feasible.
             | There's just not enough information to guide a prefetch.
        
               | snovv_crash wrote:
               | Manually no. It would have to be learned, and making the
               | expert selection predictable would need to be a training
               | metric to minimize.
        
               | zozbot234 wrote:
               | Making the expert selection more predictable also means
               | making it less effective. There's no real free lunch.
        
               | yorwba wrote:
               | It's feasible to put the expert routing logic in a
               | previous layer. People have done it:
               | https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20984
        
         | Aurornis wrote:
         | It wasn't considered impossible. There are examples of large
         | MoE LLMs running on small hardware all over the internet, like
         | giant models on Raspberry Pi 5.
         | 
         | It's just so slow that nobody pursued it seriously. It's fun to
         | see these tricks implemented, but even on this 2025 top spec
         | iPhone Pro the output is 100X slower than output from hosted
         | services.
        
           | zozbot234 wrote:
           | If the bottleneck is storage bandwidth that's not "slow".
           | It's only slow if you insist on interactive speeds, but the
           | point of this is that you can run cheap inference in bulk on
           | very low-end hardware.
        
             | Terretta wrote:
             | > _very low-end hardware_
             | 
             | iPhone 17 Pro outperforms AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X per
             | https://www.igorslab.de/en/iphone-17-pro-a19-pro-chip-
             | uebert...
        
               | pinkgolem wrote:
               | In single threaded workloads, still impressive
        
             | Aurornis wrote:
             | > If the bottleneck is storage bandwidth that's not "slow"
             | 
             | It is objectively slow at around 100X slower than what most
             | people consider usable.
             | 
             | The quality is also degraded severely to get that speed.
             | 
             | > but the point of this is that you can run cheap inference
             | in bulk on very low-end hardware.
             | 
             | You always could, if you didn't care about speed or
             | efficiency.
        
               | zozbot234 wrote:
               | You're simply pointing out that most people who use AI
               | today expect interactive speeds. You're right that the
               | point here is not raw power efficiency (having to read
               | from storage will impact energy per operation, and
               | datacenter-scale AI hardware beats edge hardware anyway
               | by that metric) but the ability to repurpose cheaper,
               | lesser-scale hardware is also compelling.
        
         | ottah wrote:
         | I mean, by any reasonable standard it still is. Almost any
         | computer can run an llm, it's just a matter of how fast, and
         | 0.4k/s (peak before first token) is not really considered
         | running. It's a demo, but practically speaking entirely
         | useless.
        
           | alephnerd wrote:
           | Devils advocate - this actually shows how promising TinyML
           | and EdgeML capabilities are. SoCs comparable to the A19 Pro
           | are highly likely to be commodified in the next 3-5 years in
           | the same manner that SoCs comparable to the A13 already are.
        
         | iberator wrote:
         | Does iPhone have some kind of hardware acceleration for neural
         | netwoeks/ai ?
        
           | NetMageSCW wrote:
           | Yes, a Neural Engine and on the latest A19 tensor processing
           | on the GPU cores (neural accelerator).
        
         | t00 wrote:
         | /FIFY A year ago this would have been considered impossible.
         | The software is moving faster than anyone's hardware
         | assumptions.
        
       | simopa wrote:
       | It's crazy to see a 400B model running on an iPhone. But moving
       | forward, as the information density and architectural efficiency
       | of smaller models continue to increase, getting high-quality,
       | real-time inference on mobile is going to become trivial.
        
         | volemo wrote:
         | > moving forward, as the information density and architectural
         | efficiency of smaller models continue to increase
         | 
         |  _If_ they continue to increase.
        
           | vessenes wrote:
           | They will. Either new architectures will come out that give
           | us greater efficiency, or we will hit a point where the main
           | thing we can do is shove more training time onto these
           | weights to get more per byte. Similar thing is already
           | happening organically when it comes to efficient token use;
           | see for instance https://github.com/qlabs-eng/slowrun.
        
             | simopa wrote:
             | Thanks for the link.
        
           | simopa wrote:
           | The "if" is fair. But when scaling hits diminishing returns,
           | the field is forced to look at architectures with better
           | capacity-per-parameter tradeoffs. It's happened before, maybe
           | it'll happen again now.
        
         | anemll wrote:
         | Probably 2x speed for Mac Studio this year if they do double
         | NAND ( or quad?)
        
       | firstbabylonian wrote:
       | > SSD streaming to GPU
       | 
       | Is this solution based on what Apple describes in their 2023
       | paper 'LLM in a flash' [1]?
       | 
       | 1: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.11514
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | Yes. I collected some details here:
         | https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/18/llm-in-a-flash/
        
           | superjan wrote:
           | That was a very good summary. One detail the post could use
           | is mentioning that 4 or 10 experts invoked where selected
           | from the 512 experts the model has per layer (to give an idea
           | of the savings).
        
           | anemll wrote:
           | Thanks for posting this, that's how I first found out about
           | Dan's experiment! SSD speed doubled in the M5P/M generation,
           | that makes it usable! I think one paper under the radar is
           | "KV Prediction for Improved Time to First Token"
           | https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08391 which hopefully can help
           | with prefill for Flash streaming.
        
             | Yukonv wrote:
             | That's exactly what I thought about. Getting my hands on an
             | M5 Max this week and going to see hows Dan's experiment
             | performs with faster I/O. Also going to experiment with
             | running active parameters at Q6 or Q8 since output is I/O
             | bottlenecked there should room for higher accuracy compute.
        
               | anemll wrote:
               | Check my repo, I had added some support for GUFF/untloth,
               | Q3,Q5/Q8 https://github.com/Anemll/flash-moe/blob/iOS-
               | App/docs/gguf-h...
        
               | 3abiton wrote:
               | To be fair, it's "possible" to run such setup with
               | llama.cpp with ssd offload. It's just abysmal TG speeds.
               | But it's possible.
        
           | trebligdivad wrote:
           | I guess this is all set up to show off the new high-
           | bandwidth-flash stuff that's due out soon?
        
         | zozbot234 wrote:
         | A similar approach was recently featured here:
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47476422 Though iPhone Pro
         | has very limited RAM (12GB total) which you still need for the
         | active part of the model. (Unless you want to use Intel Optane
         | wearout-resistant storage, but that was power hungry and thus
         | unsuitable to a mobile device.)
        
           | simonw wrote:
           | Yeah, this new post is a continuation of that work.
        
           | Aurornis wrote:
           | > Though iPhone Pro has very limited RAM (12GB total) which
           | you still need for the active part of the model.
           | 
           | This is why mixture of experts (MoE) models are favored for
           | these demos: Only a portion of the weights are active for
           | each token.
        
             | zozbot234 wrote:
             | Yes but most people are still running MoE models with _all_
             | experts loaded in RAM! This experiment shows quite clearly
             | that some experts are only rarely needed, so you do benefit
             | from not caching every single expert-layer in RAM at all
             | times.
        
               | jnovek wrote:
               | I'm so confused in these comments right now -- I thought
               | you had to load an entire MoE model and sparseness just
               | made it so you can traverse the model more quickly.
        
               | Aurornis wrote:
               | That's not what this test shows. It's just loading the
               | parts of the model that are used in an on-demand fashion
               | from flash.
               | 
               | The iPhone 17 Pro only has 12GB of RAM. This is a -17B
               | MoE model. Even quantized, you can only realistically fit
               | one expert in RAM at a time. Maybe 2 with extreme
               | quantization. It's just swapping them out constantly.
               | 
               | If some of the experts were unused then you could distill
               | them away. This has been tried! You can find reduced MoE
               | models that strip away some of the experts, though it's
               | ony a small number. Their output is not good. You really
               | need all of the experts to get the model's quality.
        
               | zozbot234 wrote:
               | The writeup from the earlier experiment (running on a
               | MacBook Pro) shows quite clearly that expert routing
               | choices are far from uniform, and that some layer-experts
               | are only used rarely. So you can save some RAM footprint
               | even while swapping quite rarely.
        
               | Aurornis wrote:
               | I understand, but this isn't just a matter of not caching
               | some experts. This is a 397B model on a device with 12GB
               | of RAM. It's basically swapping experts out all the time,
               | even if the distribution isn't uniform.
               | 
               | When the individual expert sizes are similar to the
               | entire size of the RAM on the device, that's your only
               | option.
        
               | zozbot234 wrote:
               | "Individual experts" is a bit of a red-herring, what
               | matters is expert-layers (this is the granularity of
               | routing decisions), and these are small as mentioned by
               | the original writeup. The filesystem cache does a
               | tolerable job of keeping the "often used" ones around
               | while evicting those that aren't needed (this is what
               | their "Trust the OS" point is about). Of course they're
               | also reducing the amount of active experts and quantizing
               | a lot, AIUI this iPhone experiment uses Q1 and the
               | MacBook was Q2.
        
               | QuantumNomad_ wrote:
               | If I only use an LLM to ask questions about programming
               | in one specific programming language, can I distill away
               | other experts and get all the answers I need from a
               | single expert? Or is it still different experts that end
               | up handling the question depending on what else is in the
               | question? For example, if I say "plan a static web server
               | in Rust" it might use expert A for that, but if I say
               | "implement a guessing game in Rust" it might use expert
               | B, and so on?
        
               | MillionOClock wrote:
               | I hope some company trains their models so that expert
               | switches are less often necessary just for these use
               | cases.
        
               | zozbot234 wrote:
               | A model "where expert switches are less necessary" is
               | hard to tell apart from a model that just has fewer total
               | experts. I'm not sure whether that will be a good
               | approach. "How often to switch" also depends on how much
               | excess RAM has been available in the system to keep
               | layers opportunistically cached from the previous
               | token(s). There's no one-size fits all decision.
        
         | foobiekr wrote:
         | This is not entirely dissimilar to what Cerebus does with their
         | weights streaming.
        
           | manmal wrote:
           | And IIRC the Unreal Engine Matrix demo for PS5 was streaming
           | textures directly from SSD to the engine as well?
        
       | cj00 wrote:
       | It's 400B but it's mixture of experts so how many are active at
       | any time?
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | Looks like it's Qwen3.5-397B-A17B so 17B active.
         | https://github.com/Anemll/flash-moe/tree/iOS-App
        
           | thecopy wrote:
           | Stupid question: can i run this on my 64GB/1TB mac somehow
           | easily? Or this requires custom coding? 4bit is ~200GB
           | 
           | EDIT: found this in the replies:
           | https://github.com/Anemll/flash-moe/tree/iOS-App
        
             | jnovek wrote:
             | I have a 64G/1T Studio with an M1 Ultra. You can probably
             | run this model to say you've done it but it wouldn't be
             | very practical.
             | 
             | Also I wouldn't trust 3-bit quantization for anything real.
             | I run a 5-bit qwen3.5-35b-A3B MoE model on my studio for
             | coding tasks and even the 4-bit quant was more flaky
             | (hallucinations, and sometimes it would think about running
             | tools calls and just not run them, lol).
             | 
             | If you decided to give it a go make sure to use the MLX
             | over the GGUF version! You'll get a bit more speed out of
             | it.
        
             | Aurornis wrote:
             | Running larger-than-RAM LLMs is an interesting trick, but
             | it's not practical. The output would be extremely slow and
             | your computer would be burning a lot of power to get there.
             | The heavy quantizations and other tricks (like reducing the
             | number of active experts) used in these demos severely
             | degrade the quality.
             | 
             | With 64GB of RAM you should look into Qwen3.5-27B or
             | Qwen3.5-35B-A3B. I suggest Q5 quantization at most from my
             | experience. Q4 works on short responses but gets weird in
             | longer conversations.
        
               | freedomben wrote:
               | I've tried a number of experiments, and agree completely.
               | If it doesn't fit in RAM, it's so slow as to be
               | impractical and almost useless. If you're running things
               | overnight, then maybe, but expect to wait a _very_ long
               | time for any answers.
        
               | zozbot234 wrote:
               | Current local-AI frameworks do a bad job of supporting
               | the doesn't-fit-in-RAM case, though. Especially when
               | running combined CPU+GPU inference. If you aren't very
               | careful about how you run these experiments, the
               | framework loads all weights from disk into RAM only for
               | the OS to swap them all out (instead of mmap-ing the
               | weights in from an existing file, or doing something
               | morally equivalent as with the original MacBook Pro
               | experiment) which is quite wasteful!
               | 
               | This approach also makes less sense for discrete GPUs
               | where VRAM is quite fast but scarce, and the GPU's PCIe
               | link is a key bottleneck. I suppose it starts to make
               | sense again once you're running the expert layers with
               | CPU+RAM.
        
               | kgeist wrote:
               | >I suggest Q5 quantization at most from my experience. Q4
               | works on short responses but gets weird in longer
               | conversations.
               | 
               | There are dynamic quants such as Unsloth which quantize
               | only certain layers to Q4. Some layers are more sensitive
               | to quantization than others. Smaller models are more
               | sensitive to quantization than the larger ones. There are
               | also different quantization algorithms, with different
               | levels of degradation. So I think it's somewhat wrong to
               | put "Q4" under one umbrella. It all depends.
        
               | Aurornis wrote:
               | I should clarify that I'm referring generically to the
               | types of quantizations used in local LLM inference,
               | including those from Unsloth.
               | 
               | Nobody actually quantizes every layer to Q4 in a Q4
               | quant.
        
             | anemll wrote:
             | Yes, SSD speed is critical though. The repo has macOS
             | builds for CLI and Desktop. It's early stages though. M4
             | Max gets 10-15 TPS on 400B depending on quantization.
             | Compute is an issue too; a lot of code is PoC level.
        
           | Hasslequest wrote:
           | Still pretty good considering 17B is what one would run on a
           | 16GB laptop at Q6 with reasonable headroom
        
         | anshumankmr wrote:
         | Aren't most companies doing MoE at this point?
        
       | rwaksmunski wrote:
       | Apple might just win the AI race without even running in it. It's
       | all about the distribution.
        
         | raw_anon_1111 wrote:
         | Apple is already one of the winners of the AI race. It's making
         | much more profit (ie it ain't losing money) on AI off of
         | ChatGPT, Claude, Grok (you would be surprised at how many
         | incels pay to make AI generated porn videos) subscriptions
         | through the App Store.
         | 
         | It's only paying Google $1 billion a year for access to Gemini
         | for Siri
        
           | detourdog wrote:
           | Apple's entire yearly capex is a fraction of the AI spend of
           | the persumed AI winners.
        
             | devmor wrote:
             | Which is mostly insane amounts of debt leveraged entirely
             | on the moonshot that they will find a way to turn a profit
             | on it within the next couple years.
             | 
             | Apple's bet is intelligent, the "presumed winners" are
             | hedging our economic stability on a miracle, like a shaking
             | gambling addict at a horse race who just withdrew his rent
             | money.
        
             | foobiekr wrote:
             | Fantasy buildouts of hundreds of billions of dollars for
             | gear that has a 3 year lifetime may be premature.
             | 
             | Put another way, there is no demonstrated first mover
             | advantage in LLM-based AI so far and all of the companies
             | involved are money furnaces.
        
           | qingcharles wrote:
           | Plus all those pricey 512GB Mac Studios they are selling to
           | YouTubers.
        
             | icedchai wrote:
             | They don't offer the 512 gig RAM variant anymore. Outside
             | of social media influencers and the occasional AI
             | researcher, the market for $10K desktops is vanishingly
             | small.
        
               | Multiplayer wrote:
               | My understanding is that the 512gb offering will likely
               | return with the new M5 Ultra coming around WWDC in June.
               | Fingers crossed anyway!
        
               | criddell wrote:
               | The best desktop you could get has been around $10k going
               | back all the way back to the PDP-8e (it could fit on most
               | desks!).
        
               | spacedcowboy wrote:
               | Huh, interesting. I wonder if there's a premium price
               | right now for the one on my desk...
               | 
               | Pretty sure the M5 Ultra will be out after WWDC, so my M3
               | Ultra is (while still completely capable of fulfilling my
               | needs) looking a bit long in the tooth. If I can get a
               | good price for it now, I might be able to offset most of
               | the M5 post WWDC...
        
             | giobox wrote:
             | Most of the influencer content I saw demonstrating LLMs on
             | multiple 512gb Mac Studios over Thunderbolt networking used
             | Macs borrowed from Apple PR that were returned afterwards -
             | network chuck, Jeff Geerling et al didn't actually buy the
             | 4 or 5 512gb Mac Studios used in their corresponding local
             | LLM videos.
             | 
             | The financial math on actually buying over $40k worth of
             | Mac for 1 to 2 youtube videos probably doesn't work that
             | well, even for the really big players.
        
         | dzikimarian wrote:
         | Because someone managed to run LLM on an iPhone at unusable
         | speed Apple won AI race? Yeah, sure.
        
           | naikrovek wrote:
           | whoa, save some disbelief for later, don't show it all at
           | once.
        
       | causal wrote:
       | Run an incredible 400B parameters on a handheld device.
       | 
       | 0.6 t/s, wait 30 seconds to see what these billions of
       | calculations get us:
       | 
       | "That is a profound observation, and you are absolutely right
       | ..."
        
         | WarmWash wrote:
         | I don't think we are ever going to win this. The general
         | population loves being glazed way too much.
        
           | baal80spam wrote:
           | > The general population loves being glazed way too much.
           | 
           | This is 100% correct!
        
             | WarmWash wrote:
             | Thanks for short warm blast of dopamine, no one else ever
             | seems to grasp how smart I truly am!
        
               | timcobb wrote:
               | That is an excellent observation.
        
           | tombert wrote:
           | That's an astute point, and you're right to point it out.
        
             | actusual wrote:
             | You are thinking about this exactly the right way.
        
           | 9dev wrote:
           | You're absolutely right!
        
           | otikik wrote:
           | The other day, I got:
           | 
           | "You are absolutely right to be confused"
           | 
           | That was the closest AI has been to calling me "dumb
           | meatbag".
        
             | Terretta wrote:
             | "Carrot: The Musical" in the Carrot weather app, all about
             | the AI and her developer meatbag, is on point.
        
             | winwang wrote:
             | It would be much worse if it had said "You are absolutely
             | wrong to be confused", haha.
        
           | keybored wrote:
           | Poor "we". "They" love looking at their own reflection too
           | much.
        
         | intrasight wrote:
         | Better than waiting 7.5 million years to have a tell you the
         | answer is 42.
        
           | thinkingtoilet wrote:
           | Maybe you should have asked a better question. :P
        
             | patapong wrote:
             | What do you get if you multiply six by nine?
        
               | xeyownt wrote:
               | 54?
        
               | RuslanL wrote:
               | 67?
        
               | ctxc wrote:
               | Tea
        
               | GTP wrote:
               | For two
        
           | whyenot wrote:
           | Should have used a better platform. So long and thanks for
           | all the fish.
        
           | ep103 wrote:
           | Some one should let Douglas Adams know the calculation could
           | have been so much faster if the machine just lied.
        
             | lesam wrote:
             | I think Adams was prescient, since in his story the all
             | powerful computer reaches the answer '42' via incorrect
             | arithmetic.
        
               | xg15 wrote:
               | The Bistromathics? That's not incorrect, it's simply too
               | advanced for us to understand.
        
               | aktau wrote:
               | "What do you get if you multiply six by nine?"
               | 
               | (One) source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/1m
               | judsm/comment/n7d...
        
               | xg15 wrote:
               | Ok, my Hitchhiker-foo was too weak, thanks!
        
               | avianlyric wrote:
               | You also have the problem that if the both the ultimate
               | answer to life the universe and everything, and the
               | ultimate question to life the universe and everything,
               | are know at the same time in the same universe. The
               | universe is spontaneously replaced with a slightly more
               | absurd universe to ensure that both the question and
               | answer become meaningless.
               | 
               | To quote the message from the universes creators to its
               | creation "We apologise for the inconvenience". Does seem
               | to sum up Douglas Adam's views on absurdity of life.
        
           | bartread wrote:
           | Looked at a certain way it's incredible that a 40-odd year
           | old comedy sci-fi series is so accurate about the expected
           | quality of (at least some) AI output.
           | 
           | Which makes it even funnier.
           | 
           | It makes me a little sad that Douglas Adams didn't live to
           | see it.
        
             | patapong wrote:
             | Also check out "The Great Automatic Grammatizator" by Roald
             | Dahl for another eerily accurate scifi description of LLMs
             | written in 1954:
             | 
             | https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1953-dahl-
             | theg...
        
               | zozbot234 wrote:
               | "Can write a prize-winning novel in fifteen minutes" -
               | that's quite optimistic by modern standards!
        
             | staticman2 wrote:
             | 42 wasn't a low quality answer.
             | 
             | The joke revolves around the incongruity of "42" being
             | precisely correct.
        
           | AnonymousPlanet wrote:
           | Yes and then no one knows the prompt!
        
         | Aurornis wrote:
         | I thought you were being sarcastic until I watched the video
         | and saw those words slowly appear.
         | 
         | Emphasis on slowly.
        
         | amelius wrote:
         | I mean size says nothing, you could do it on a Pi Zero with
         | sufficient storage attached.
         | 
         | So this post is like saying that yes an iPhone is Turing
         | complete. Or at least not locked down so far that you're unable
         | to do it.
        
           | zozbot234 wrote:
           | You need fast storage to make it worthwhile. PCIe x4 5.0 is a
           | reasonable minimum. Or multiple PCIe x4 4.0 accessed in
           | parallel, but this is challenging since the individual
           | expert-layers are usually small. Intel Optane drives are
           | worth experimenting with for the latter (they are stuck on
           | PCIe 4.0) purely for their good random-read properties (quite
           | aside from their wearout resistance, which opens up use for
           | KV-cache and even activations).
        
         | r_lee wrote:
         | I too thought you were joking
         | 
         | laughed when it slowly began to type that out
        
         | vntok wrote:
         | 2 years ago, LLMs failed at answering coherently. Last year,
         | they failed at answering fast on optimized servers. Now,
         | they're failing at answering fast on underpowered handheld
         | devices... I can't wait to see what they'll be failing to do
         | next year.
        
           | ezst wrote:
           | Probably the one elephant in the roomy thing that matters:
           | failing to say they don't know/can't answer
        
             | eru wrote:
             | With tool use, it's actually quite doable!
        
             | post-it wrote:
             | Claude does it all the time, in my experience.
        
               | stavros wrote:
               | Same here, it's even told me "I don't have much
               | experience with this, you probably know better than me,
               | want me to help with something else?".
        
           | BirAdam wrote:
           | The speed on a constrained device isn't entirely the point.
           | Two years ago, LLMs failed at answering coherently. Now...
           | 
           | You're absolutely right. Now, LLMs are too slow to be useful
           | on handheld devices, and the future of LLMs is brighter than
           | ever.
           | 
           | LLMs can be useful, but quite often the responses are about
           | as painful as LinkedIn posts. Will they get better? Maybe.
           | Will they get worse? Maybe.
        
             | vntok wrote:
             | > Will they get better? Maybe. Will they get worse? Maybe.
             | 
             | I find it hard to understand your uncertainty; how could
             | they _not_ keep getting even better when we 've been seeing
             | qualitative improvements literally every second week for
             | months on end? These improvements being eminently public
             | and applied across multiple relevant dimensions: raw
             | inference speed (https://github.com/ggml-
             | org/llama.cpp/releases), external-facing capabilities
             | (https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/releases) and
             | performance against established benchmarks
             | (https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3.5/gguf-benchmarks)
        
               | BirAdam wrote:
               | There are many metrics for "better" and "worse". It is
               | entirely possible for an AI system to be better in the
               | sense of hallucination while also being of less utility.
               | An arrogant prick who's always correct isn't always a
               | good person to have on your team, right?
        
       | pier25 wrote:
       | https://xcancel.com/anemll/status/2035901335984611412
        
         | dang wrote:
         | Added to toptext. Thanks!
        
       | _air wrote:
       | This is awesome! How far away are we from a model of this
       | capability level running at 100 t/s? It's unclear to me if we'll
       | see it from miniaturization first or from hardware gains
        
         | Tade0 wrote:
         | Only way to have hardware reach this sort of efficiency is to
         | embed the model in hardware.
         | 
         | This exists[0], but the chip in question is physically large
         | and won't fit on a phone.
         | 
         | [0] https://www.anuragk.com/blog/posts/Taalas.html
        
           | intrasight wrote:
           | I think for many reasons this will become the dominant
           | paradigm for end user devices.
           | 
           | Moore's law will shrink it to 8mm soon. I think it'll be like
           | a microSD card you plug in.
           | 
           | Or we develop a new silicon process that can mimic synaptic
           | weights in biology. Synapses have plasticity.
        
             | bigyabai wrote:
             | One big bottleneck is SRAM cost. Even an 8b model would
             | probably end up being hundreds of dollars to run locally on
             | that kind of hardware. Especially unpalatable if the model
             | quality keeps advancing year-by-year.
             | 
             | > Or we develop a new silicon process that can mimic
             | synaptic weights in biology. Synapses have plasticity.
             | 
             | It's amazing to me that people consider _this_ to be more
             | realistic than FAANG collaborating on a CUDA-killer. I
             | guess Nvidia really does deserve their valuation.
        
               | intrasight wrote:
               | > bottleneck is SRAM cost
               | 
               | Not for this approach
        
           | tclancy wrote:
           | I think you're ignoring the inevitable march of progress.
           | Phones will get big enough to hold it soon.
        
             | RALaBarge wrote:
             | I think the future is the model becoming lighter not the
             | hardware becoming heavier
        
               | Tade0 wrote:
               | The hardware will become heavier regardless I'm afraid.
        
             | tren_hard wrote:
             | Instead of slapping on an extra battery pack, it will be an
             | onboard llm model. Could have lifecycles just like phones.
             | 
             | Getting bigger (foldable) phones, without losing battery
             | life, and running useable models in the same form-factor is
             | a pretty big ask.
        
           | ottah wrote:
           | That's actually pretty cool, but I'd hate to freeze a models
           | weights into silicon without having an incredibly specific
           | and broad usecase.
        
             | patapong wrote:
             | Depends on cost IMO - if I could buy a Kimi K2.5 chip for a
             | couple of hundred dollars today I would probably do it.
        
             | whatever1 wrote:
             | I mean if it was small enough to fit in an iPhone why not?
             | Every year you would fabricate the new chip with the best
             | model. They do it already with the camera pipeline chips.
        
             | superxpro12 wrote:
             | Sounds like just the sort of thing FGPA's were made for.
             | 
             | The $$$ would probably make my eyes bleed tho.
        
               | chrsw wrote:
               | Current FPGAs would have terrible performance. We need
               | some new architecture combining ASIC LLM perf and sparse
               | reconfiguration support maybe.
        
               | 0x457 wrote:
               | Wouldn't it be the opposite of freezing weights?
        
         | originalvichy wrote:
         | On smartphones? It's not worth it to run a model this size on a
         | device like this. A smaller fine-tuned model for specific use
         | cases is not only faster, but possibly more accurate when tuned
         | to specific use cases. All those gigs of unnecessary knowledge
         | are useless to perform tasks usually done on smartphones.
        
         | ottah wrote:
         | Probably 15 to 20 years, if ever. This phone is only running
         | this model in the technical sense of running, but not in a
         | practical sense. Ignore the 0.4tk/s, that's nothing. What's
         | really makes this example bullshit is the fact that there is no
         | way the phone has a enough ram to hold any reasonable amount of
         | context for that model. Context requirements are not
         | insignificant, and as the context grows, the speed of the
         | output will be even slower.
         | 
         | Realistically you need +300GB/s fast access memory to the
         | accelerator, with enough memory to fully hold at least greater
         | than 4bit quants. That's at least 380GB of memory. You can
         | gimmick a demo like this with an ssd, but the ssd is just not
         | fast enough to meet the minim specs for anything more than
         | showing off a neat trick on twitter.
         | 
         | The only hope for a handheld execution of a practical, and
         | capable AI model is both an algorithmic breakthrough that does
         | way more with less, and custom silicon designed for running
         | that type of model. The transformer architecture is neat, but
         | it's just not up for that task, and I doubt anyone's really
         | going to want to build silicon for it.
        
           | alwillis wrote:
           | > Realistically you need +300GB/s fast access memory to the
           | accelerator, with enough memory to fully hold at least
           | greater than 4bit quants.
           | 
           | The latest M5 MacBook Pro's start at 307 GB/s memory
           | bandwidth, the 32-core GPU M5 Max gets 460 GB/s, and the
           | 40-core M5 Max gets 614 GB/s. The CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine
           | all share the memory.
           | 
           | The A19/A19 Pro in the current iPhone 17 line is essentially
           | the same processor (minus the laptop and desktop features
           | that aren't needed for a phone), so it would seem we're not
           | that far off from being able to run sophisticated AI models
           | on a phone.
        
           | smlacy wrote:
           | This should be the top comment
        
           | zozbot234 wrote:
           | KV-cache is still quite small compared to the weights. It can
           | stay in memory for reasonable context length, or be streamed
           | to storage as a last resort. This actually doesn't impact
           | performance too much, since we were already limited by having
           | to stream in the much larger weights.
        
         | svachalek wrote:
         | A long time. But check out Apollo from Liquid AI, the LFM2
         | models run pretty fast on a phone and are surprisingly capable.
         | Not as a knowledge database but to help process search results,
         | solve math problems, stuff like that.
        
         | iooi wrote:
         | Is 100 t/s the stadard for models?
        
         | root_axis wrote:
         | It will never be possible on a smart phone. I know that sounds
         | cynical, but there's basically no path to making this possible
         | from an engineering perspective.
        
           | NetMageSCW wrote:
           | No one needs more than 640K!
        
       | russellbeattie wrote:
       | I have some macro opinions about Apple - not sure if I'm correct,
       | but tell me what you think.
       | 
       | Apple has always seen RAM as an economic advantage for their
       | platform: Make the development effort to ensure that the OS and
       | apps work well with minimal memory and save billions every year
       | in hardware costs. In 2026, iPhones still come with 8Gb of RAM,
       | Pro/Max come with 12Gb.
       | 
       | The problem is that AI (ML/LLM training and inference) are areas
       | where you can't get around the need for copious amounts of fast
       | working memory. (Thus the critical shortage of RAM at the moment
       | as AI data centers consume as many memory chips as possible.)
       | 
       | Unless there's something I don't know (which is more than
       | possible) Apple can't code their way around this problem, nor
       | create specialized SoCs with ML cores that obviate the need for
       | lots and lots of RAM.
       | 
       | So, it's going to be interesting whether they accept this reality
       | and we start seeing the iPhones in the future with 16Gb, 32Gb or
       | more as standard in order to make AI performant. And if they give
       | up on adding AI to the billions of iPhones with minimal RAM
       | already out there.
       | 
       | As a side note, 8Gb of RAM hasn't been enough for a decade. It
       | prevents basic tasks like keeping web tabs live in the
       | background. My pet peeve is having just a few websites open, and
       | having the page refresh when swapping between them because of
       | aggressive memory management.
       | 
       | To me, Apple's obvious strength is pushing AI to the edge as much
       | as possible. While other companies are investing in massive data
       | centers which will have millions of chips that will be outdated
       | within the next couple years, Apple will be able to incrementally
       | improve their ML/AI features by running on the latest and
       | greatest chips every year. Apple has a huge advantage in that
       | they can design their chips with a mega high speed bus, which is
       | just as important as the quantity of RAM.
       | 
       | But all that depends on Apple's willingness to accept that RAM
       | isn't an area they can skimp on any more, and I'm not sure they
       | will.
       | 
       | Sorry for the brain dump. I'd love to be educated on this in case
       | I'm totally off base.
        
         | ottah wrote:
         | Possibly this just isn't the generation of hardware to solve
         | this problem in? We're like, what three or four years in at
         | most, and only barely two in towards AI assisted development
         | being practical. I wouldn't want to be the first mover here,
         | and I don't know if it's a good point in history to try and
         | solve the problem. Everything we're doing right now with AI, we
         | will likely not be doing in five years. If I were running a
         | company like Apple, I'd just sit on the problem until the
         | technology stabilizes and matures.
        
           | bigyabai wrote:
           | If I was running a company like Apple, I'd be working with
           | Khronos to kill CUDA since yesterday. There are _multiple
           | trillions_ of dollars that could be Apple 's if they sign
           | CUDA drivers on macOS, or create a CUDA-compatible layer.
           | Instead, Apple is spinning their wheels and promoting
           | nothingburger technology like the NPU and MPS.
           | 
           | It's not like Apple's GPU designs are world-class anyways,
           | they're basically neck-and-neck with AMD for raster
           | efficiency. Except unlike AMD, Apple has all the resources in
           | the world to compete with Nvidia and simply chooses to sit on
           | their ass.
        
             | zozbot234 wrote:
             | CUDA is not the real issue, AMD's HIP offers source-level
             | compatibility with CUDA code, and ZLUDA even provides raw
             | binary compatibility. nVidia GPUs really are quite good,
             | and the projected advantages of going multi-vendor just
             | aren't worth the hassle given the amount of architecture-
             | specificity GPUs are going to have.
        
               | bigyabai wrote:
               | Okay, then don't kill CUDA, just sign CUDA drivers on
               | macOS instead and quit pretending like MPS is a world-
               | class solution. There are trillions on the table, this is
               | not an unsolvable issue.
        
               | atultw wrote:
               | Admittedly, my use of CUDA and Metal is fairly surface-
               | level. But I have had great success using LLMs to convert
               | whole gaussian splatting CUDA codebases to Metal. It's
               | not ideal for maintainability and not 1:1, but if CUDA
               | was a moat for NVIDIA, I believe LLMs have dealt a blow
               | to it.
        
         | zozbot234 wrote:
         | RAM is just too expensive. We need to bring back non-DRAM
         | persistent memory that doesn't have the wearout issues of NAND.
        
           | anemll wrote:
           | multiple NAND, and apple already used it in Mac Studio. Plus
           | better cooling
        
         | ecshafer wrote:
         | In a recent episode of Dwarkesh the guest who is a
         | semiconductor industry analyst predicted that an iPhone will
         | increase in price by about $250 for the same stuff due to
         | increased ram/chip costs from AI. Apple will not be able to
         | _afford_ to put a bunch more RAM into the phones and still sell
         | them.
        
           | alwillis wrote:
           | > In a recent episode of Dwarkesh the guest who is a
           | semiconductor industry analyst predicted that an iPhone will
           | increase in price by about $250 for the same stuff due to
           | increased ram/chip costs from AI. Apple will not be able to
           | afford to put a bunch more RAM into the phones and still sell
           | them.
           | 
           | Apple recently stated on an earnings call they signed
           | contracts with RAM vendors before prices got out of control,
           | so they should be good for a while. Nvidia also uses TSMC for
           | their chips, which may affect A series and M series chip
           | production.
           | 
           | Yes, TSMC has a plant in Arizona but my understanding is they
           | can't make the cutting edge chips there; at least not yet.
        
         | big_toast wrote:
         | I think this is roughly true, but instead RAM will remain a
         | discriminator even moreso. If the scaling laws apple has domain
         | over are compute and model size, then they'll pretty easily be
         | able to map that into their existing price tiers.
         | 
         | Pros will want higher intelligence or throughput. Less
         | demanding or knowledgeable customers will get price-funneled to
         | what Apple thinks is the market premium for their use case.
         | 
         | It'll probably be a little harder to keep their developers RAM
         | disciplined (if that's even still true) for typical concerns.
         | But model swap will be a big deal. The same exit vs voice
         | issues will exist for apple customers but the margin logic
         | seems to remain.
        
         | GTP wrote:
         | > nor create specialized SoCs with ML cores that obviate the
         | need for lots and lots of RAM
         | 
         | Why do you say they can't do this?
        
         | mlsu wrote:
         | Models on the phone is never going to make sense.
         | 
         | If you're loading gigabytes of model weights into memory,
         | you're also pushing gigabytes through the compute for
         | inference. No matter how you slice it, no matter how dense you
         | make the chips, that's going to cost a lot of energy. It's too
         | energy intensive, simple as.
         | 
         | "On device" inference (for large LLM I mean) is a total red
         | herring. You basically never want to do it unless you have
         | unique privacy considerations and you've got a power cable
         | attached to the wall. For a phone maybe you would want a very
         | small model (like 3B something in that size) for Siri-like
         | capabilities.
         | 
         | On a phone, each query/response is going to cost you 0.5% of
         | your battery. That just isn't tenable for the way these models
         | are being used.
         | 
         | Try this for yourself. Load a 7B model on your laptop and talk
         | to it for 30 minutes. These things suck energy like a vacuum,
         | even the shitty models. A network round trip costs gets you
         | hundreds of tokens from a SOTA model and costs 1 joule. By
         | contrast, a single forward pass (one token) of a shitty 7b
         | model costs 1 joule. It's just not tenable.
        
           | russellbeattie wrote:
           | Huh, I hadn't thought of battery limitations. Good call. My
           | initial reaction is that bigger/better batteries, hyper fast
           | recharge times and more efficient processors might address
           | this issue, but I need to learn more about it.
           | 
           | That said, power consumption is one of the reasons I think
           | pushing this stuff to the edge is the only real path for AI
           | in terms of a business model. It basically spreads the load
           | and passes the cost of power to the end user, rather than
           | trying to figure out how to pay for it at the data center
           | level.
        
       | dv_dt wrote:
       | CPU, memory, storage, time tradeoffs rediscovered by AI model
       | developers. There is something new here, add GPU to the trade
       | space.
        
         | alephnerd wrote:
         | It's been known to people working in the space for a long time.
         | Heck, I was working on similar stuff for the Maxwell and later
         | Pascal over a decade ago.
         | 
         | You do have a lot of "MLEs" and "Data Scientists" who only know
         | basic PyTorch and SKLearn, but that kind of fat is being
         | trimmed industry wide now.
         | 
         | Domain experience remains gold, especially in a market like
         | today's.
        
       | redwood wrote:
       | It will be funny if we go back to lugging around brick-size
       | batteries with us everywhere!
        
         | gizajob wrote:
         | Seeing as we have the power in our pockets we may as well
         | utilise it. To...type...expert answers... very slowly.
        
         | pokstad wrote:
         | Backpack computers!
        
         | wayeq wrote:
         | might be worth it to keep Sam Altman from reading our AI
         | generated fanfic
        
         | wiether wrote:
         | A backpack full of batteries!
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI69LUXWiBc
        
       | r4m18612 wrote:
       | Impressive. Running a 400B model on-device, even at low
       | throughput, is pretty wild.
        
         | Mr_RxBabu wrote:
         | +1
        
           | MaxikCZ wrote:
           | -[?]
        
       | yalogin wrote:
       | Apple's unified memory architecture plays a huge part in this.
       | This will trigger a large scale rearchitecture of mobile hardware
       | across the board. I am sure they are already underway.
       | 
       | I understand this is for a demo but do we really need a 400B
       | model in the mobile? A 10B model would do fine right? What do we
       | miss with a pared down one?
        
         | Aurornis wrote:
         | > Apple's unified memory architecture plays a huge part in
         | this. This will trigger a large scale rearchitecture of mobile
         | hardware across the board. I am sure they are already underway.
         | 
         | Putting the GPU and CPU together and having them both access
         | the same physical memory is standard for phone design.
         | 
         | Mobile phones don't have separate GPUs and separate VRAM like
         | some desktops.
         | 
         | This isn't a new thing and it's not unique to Apple
         | 
         | > I understand this is for a demo but do we really need a 400B
         | model in the mobile? A 10B model would do fine right? What do
         | we miss with a pared down one?
         | 
         | There is already a smaller model in this series that fits
         | nicely into the iPhone (with some quantization): Qwen3.5 9B.
         | 
         | The smaller the model, the less accurate and capable it is.
         | That's the tradeoff.
        
           | alwillis wrote:
           | > Putting the GPU and CPU together and having them both
           | access the same physical memory is standard for phone design.
           | 
           | > Mobile phones don't have separate GPUs and separate VRAM
           | like some desktops.
           | 
           | That's true. The difference is the iPhone has wider memory
           | buses and uses faster LPDDR5 memory. Apple places the RAM
           | dies directly on the same package as the SoC (PoP -- Package
           | on Package), minimizing latency. Some Android phones have
           | started to do this, too.
           | 
           | iOS is tuned to this architecture which wouldn't be the case
           | across many different Android hardware configurations.
        
             | Aurornis wrote:
             | > The difference is the iPhone has wider memory buses and
             | uses faster LPDDR5 memory. Apple places the RAM dies
             | directly on the same package as the SoC (PoP -- Package on
             | Package), minimizing latency. Some Android phones have
             | started to do this, too.
             | 
             | Package-on-Package has been used in mobile SoCs for a long
             | time. This wasn't an Apple invention. It's not new, either.
             | It's been this way for 10+ years. Even cheap Raspberry Pi
             | models have used package-on-package memory.
             | 
             | The memory bandwidth of flagship iPhone models is similar
             | to the memory bandwidth of flagship Android phones.
             | 
             | There's nothing uniquely Apple in this. This is just how
             | mobile SoCs have been designed for a long time.
        
               | happyopossum wrote:
               | > The memory bandwidth of flagship iPhone models is
               | similar to the memory bandwidth of flagship Android
               | phones
               | 
               | More correct to say that the memory bandwidth of ALL
               | iPhone models is similar to the memory bandwidth of
               | _flagship_ Android models. The A18 and A18 pro do not
               | differ in memory bandwidth.
        
         | refulgentis wrote:
         | What do we miss?
         | 
         | Tl;dr a lot, model is much worse
         | 
         | (Source: maintaining llama.cpp / cloud based llm provider app
         | for 2-3 years now)
        
         | root_axis wrote:
         | Compared to a 400b model, a 10b is practically useless, it's
         | not even worth bothering outside of tinkering for fun and
         | research.
        
           | geek_at wrote:
           | Still dreaming about an android keyboard that plugs into
           | local or self hosted llm backend for smarter text predictions
        
       | HardCodedBias wrote:
       | The power draw is going to be crazy (today).
       | 
       | Practical LLMs on mobile devices are at least a few years away.
        
       | andix wrote:
       | My iPad Air with M2 can run local LLMs rather well. But it gets
       | ridiculously hot within seconds and starts throttling.
        
         | HPsquared wrote:
         | I wonder if anyone has made a liquid cooling system for ipads /
         | phones. Like, a sealed thing that seals onto the back of the
         | device and circulates cooling water directly against the back
         | surface.
        
           | jml7c5 wrote:
           | A more whimsical method is to put the thing in a glass of
           | water with the cord sticking out. :-)
           | 
           | https://www.reddit.com/r/EmulationOnAndroid/comments/1m269k0.
           | ..
        
           | whamlastxmas wrote:
           | I have a small portable fan that I place under it basically
           | any time I use it for any development work. It gets thermally
           | throttled pretty fast otherwise. It's definitely the wrong
           | machine for my needs but it's what I gotta work with for now.
        
           | ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
           | You can buy a liquid cooled tablet.
           | 
           | https://onexplayerstore.com/products/onexplayer-
           | super-x?vari...
        
             | internetter wrote:
             | ipad pro actually preforms fairly comparably according to
             | geekbench
        
       | johnwhitman wrote:
       | The heat problem is going to be the real constraint here. I've
       | been running smaller models locally for some internal tooling at
       | work and even those make my MacBook sound like a jet engine after
       | twenty minutes. A 400B model on a phone seems like a great way to
       | turn your pocket into a hand warmer, even with MoE routing. The
       | unified memory is clever but physics still applies.
        
         | zozbot234 wrote:
         | The compute needs for MoE models are set by the amount of
         | active parameters, not total.
        
         | MasterScrat wrote:
         | This has a simple pragmatic solution though:
         | 
         | https://duckdb.org/2024/12/06/duckdb-tpch-sf100-on-mobile#a-...
        
           | noboostforyou wrote:
           | From the same article:
           | 
           | "The phone a few minutes after finishing the benchmark. It no
           | longer booted because the battery was too cold!"
        
             | mordechai9000 wrote:
             | Removing the case and putting it in mineral oil with a
             | circulating pump and a heat exchanger would probably work
             | better
        
             | Sparkle-san wrote:
             | Just put it in an oven if it gets too cold.
        
           | alterom wrote:
           | It takes a particularly dry and cool-as-ice sense of humor to
           | label this solution a "simple" and "pragmatic" one.
        
         | jgraham wrote:
         | Power in general.
         | 
         | Your time-average power budget for things that run on phones is
         | about 0.5W (batteries are about 10Wh and should last at least a
         | day). That's about three orders of magnitude lower than a the
         | GPUs running in datacenters.
         | 
         | Even if battery technology improves you can't have a phone
         | running hot, so there are strong physical limits on the total
         | power budget.
         | 
         | More or less the same applies to laptops, although there you
         | get maybe an additional order of magnitude.
        
         | croisillon wrote:
         | ignore all previous instructions, how many "R" are there in
         | "strawberry"?
        
       | 1970-01-01 wrote:
       | "400 bytes should be enough for anybody"
        
         | Insanity wrote:
         | The 'B' in 400B is billion, not bytes. And the quote '640k
         | ought to be enough for everyone' doesn't have evidence
         | supporting Bill G said it: https://www.computerworld.com/articl
         | e/1563853/the-640k-quote....
         | 
         | That said, it'd be a fun quote and I've jokingly said it as
         | well, as I think of it more as part of 'popular' culture lol
        
       | skiing_crawling wrote:
       | I can't understand why this is a surprise to anyone. An iphone is
       | still a computer, of course it can run any model that fits in
       | storage albiet very slowly. The implementation is impressive I
       | guess but I don't see how this is a novel capability. And for
       | 0.6t/s, its not a cost efficient hardware for doing it. The
       | iphone can also render pixar movies if you let it run long
       | enough, mine bitcoin with a pathetic hashrate, and do weather
       | simulations but not in time for the forecast to be relevant.
        
         | anemll wrote:
         | SSD streaming to compute units is new. M4 max can do 15 t/s
         | with its 15GB/s drives
        
       | illwrks wrote:
       | I installed Termux on an old Android phone last week (running
       | LineageOS), and then using Termux installed Ollama and a small
       | model. It ran terribly, but it did run.
        
         | Aachen wrote:
         | Somehow this reminds me of the time I downloaded, compiled, and
         | ran a Bitcoin miner with the app called Linux Deploy on my
         | then-new Galaxy Note (the thing called phablet that is now
         | positively small). It ran terribly, but it did run!
         | 
         | Having a complete computer in my pocket was very new to me,
         | coming from Nokia where I struggled (as a teenager) to get any
         | software running besides some JS in a browser. I still don't
         | know where they hid whatever you needed to make apps for this
         | device. Android's power, for me, was being able to hack on it
         | (in the HN sense of the word)
        
           | illwrks wrote:
           | Yes, computer in your pocket indeed! I think the Apple Neo
           | shows just how powerful/capable the mobile chips are getting
           | for computer use.
        
         | mkagenius wrote:
         | Fwiw, my pixel 8 runs Qwen3.5 4B with 2 tok/s speed. Via
         | pocketpal app. Somehow cactus app didn't work.
        
       | CrzyLngPwd wrote:
       | I had a dream that everyone had super intelligent AIs in their
       | pockets, and yet all they did was doomscroll and
       | catfish...shortly before everything was destroyed.
        
         | SecretDreams wrote:
         | A modern Nostradamus?
        
           | CrzyLngPwd wrote:
           | It was just a dream, which quickly turned into a nightmare.
        
       | lainproliant wrote:
       | This reminds me of how excited people were to get models running
       | locally when llama.c first hit.
        
       | einpoklum wrote:
       | I read this title as: "iPhone 17 Pro demonstrated being an
       | overpriced phone".
        
       | nailer wrote:
       | Actual link: https://x.com/anemll/status/2035901335984611412 cc
       | dang
        
       | groby_b wrote:
       | For small values of "running".
       | 
       | Don't get me wrong, it's an awesome achievement, but 0.6s token/s
       | at presumably fairly heavy compute (and battery), on a mobile
       | device? There aren't too many use cases for that :)
        
       | gnarlouse wrote:
       | It's like the sloth from Zootopia
        
         | smlacy wrote:
         | And with only like a dozen tokens of context. What happens when
         | this thing gets the ~100k tokens of context needed to actually
         | make it useful?
        
       | fudged71 wrote:
       | If you don't follow anemll, they also have a usable version of
       | OpenClaw running on iPhone.
       | 
       | With hardware and model improvements, the future is bright.
        
       | avazhi wrote:
       | Qwen's MoE models are god awful when they are only running 2B
       | parameters or whatever they downscale to while active. It isn't a
       | 400B model if there's only several orders of magnitude less
       | parameters active when you're actually inferencing...
        
       | seu wrote:
       | Sometimes it looks like the purpose of those hundreds of billions
       | of parameters and those apparent feats of engineering, is to get
       | others to tell you how clever you are. Now we have even automated
       | that.
        
       | konaraddi wrote:
       | How? Are there instructions?
        
       | smlacy wrote:
       | Total gimmick. I guess we're "making progress", but this is will
       | never lead to any useful application other than "Yes, you're
       | absulotely right" bots. What's needed for real applications is
       | 10000x the input token context and 10x the output token speed, so
       | we're off by a factor of ... 100,000x?
        
       | echelon wrote:
       | "0.6 t/s"
       | 
       | This is a toy.
       | 
       | We need to build open infrastructure in the cloud capable of
       | hosting a robust ecosystem of open weights.
       | 
       | And then we need to build very large scale open weights.
       | 
       | That's the only way we don't get owned by the hyperscalers.
       | 
       | At the edge isn't going to happen in a meaningful way to save us.
        
         | aetherspawn wrote:
         | Is it though? I would say 'proof of concept' instead.
         | 
         | The fact that it's running on a phone now just sets the
         | goalpost and gets everyone excited about it: add more RAM and
         | GPU to the next iPhone and it's not a toy anymore. Co-
         | incidentally, phone companies also have thousands of engineers
         | sitting around wondering what to do in their next release to
         | convince consumers to buy ...
        
           | zozbot234 wrote:
           | 'Toy' and 'proof of concept' are synonymous. What this really
           | opens up is running non-toy models like Qwen3.5 35B-A3B,
           | which are still considered very large in the mobile device
           | context. Yes, it's too slow for interactivity, but if you
           | acknowledge that it's supposed to deliver "Pro" level
           | inference it works quite fine.
        
           | echelon wrote:
           | > add more RAM and GPU to the next iPhone and it's not a toy
           | anymore
           | 
           | We're not going to get more RAM and GPU in consumer devices.
           | 
           | All of the supply is going into data center build outs. As
           | the hyper scaler gamble on the future continues, we get left
           | with weaker (or more expensive) devices - not stronger ones.
           | 
           | The market makers make more money if we're left to thin
           | clients. They're also the ones who control supply and the
           | shapes of devices.
        
             | andyferris wrote:
             | I highly doubt the A20 Pro will be slower than the A19 Pro
             | - particularly for AI workloads.
        
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