Apple is giving App Store Small Business Program developers free access to AFM 3 models on Private Cloud Compute if their apps have fewer than two million first-time downloads. The five-model family includes the sparse 20B-parameter AFM 3 Core Advanced, which activates only 1–4B parameters on-device, and AFM 3 Cloud Pro on Google Cloud NVIDIA GPUs, refined with outputs from Gemini.
Apple Foundation Models (AFM) is Apple's closed-ecosystem AI family. It evolved from a 3B dense model with LoRA adapters in 2024 into five models in 2026. AFM 3 Core Advanced runs a 20B IFP sparse architecture on phones while activating only 1–4B parameters; Cloud Pro runs on Google Cloud NVIDIA GPUs and is refined through Gemini distillation. There is no public API price or third-party benchmark, and access is limited to Apple's Foundation Models framework.
llama.cpp is the most widely used local LLM inference engine, implemented in pure C/C++. It supports CPU, Metal, CUDA, Vulkan, and other backends, and uses the GGUF quantization format to run multi-billion-parameter models on consumer hardware.
TurboQuant+ is an open-source implementation of a Google Research ICLR 2026 paper that uses PolarQuant + QJL two-stage quantization to compress the KV cache by 3.8-6.4x, enabling consumer hardware to run larger models with longer contexts.